One More Boat Story: My Rowboat Adventure

This is kind of sad and pathetic, but it is a fairly representative story of how I lived out the adventure of my teen years.

Across the two-mile-wide bay from Bay St. Louis stood an old seminary. It had been built as a resort hotel in the 1920's, had closed up during the depression. Some Catholic order bought it and used it as a monastery for a while, but as long as I could remember, it had been closed up and had just sat there. From across the bay, it was a big four story white stucco-looking motel. The old seminary was the only thing that broke up a line of tall pine trees around the north side of the bay.

In later years, development would creep in. Diamondhead, a gated community with a faux-Hawaiian theme, would build a marina and other fancy homes on the waterfront to the west. And then later the big whopper came along, a big DuPont factory, with smokestacks and cooling towers and flashing lights and a bright orange glow at night, plopped down right next door to the old seminary, and DuPont owned the old property. A few years later DuPont considered the old building a hazard and tore it down. Then Katrina would come along to really make fools of all those rich people who had built expensive homes on stilts right there on a shallow estuarine bay. But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I was a kid, the big old white building with a clay tile roof and old style cupola was all that was over there, and I was dying to take my Dad's skiff over to it.

My Dad had this skiff--this 14" flat-bottomed fishing boat with something like a 15-hp Mercury outboard motor. I kept asking him if he'd let me take the boat out, but he said no, because I'd "tear up" the motor. I'd get my feelings hurt and pout for a while, but then I'd ask again. Finally I had an idea: what if I got oars for it? I had worn him down, and he said, "Alright, but you better not tear it up." (Dad was forever concerned that anything I even looked at for too long would simply tear up.)

One day I went to the boat supply place and bought myself some oars. I enlisted my best buddy from school, Bill Marquez, to ride with me one hot, sunny Saturday in early May. I packed a cooler full of drinks and sandwiches. Bill brought, for some reason, a flounder gig. Maybe for protection. I got Amy Hille--Chili Hot Dog--to agree to take us down there and drop us off. So we put the boat in, and since the whole thing was my idea, I offered to row.

Rowing was not as easy or as productive as I figured it would be. It was hard to keep it going in a straight line, and every pull would move the boat about a foot and a half. (Quiz: How many times does a foot and a half go into 2 miles? Actually, it was more than 2 miles, because the boat ramp was up the river a bit, so we had to back track.) This was going to be an ordeal. I rowed for a while, and then Bill offered to take over. Bill could not get the hang of rowing and kept turning us around in a circle. I got irritated with him and told him to never mind, I would just row.

The sun beat down. The hotel seemed further away now than when we started, although the seawall was slowly receding into the distance. There wasn't much of a breeze, which was good because it kept down the chop, but the sun beat down without mercy. Sunscreen? Honestly, I don't think it had been invented yet. I don't think I had ever heard of it. I think all they had in those days was Noxzema, for once you were already burnt.

(That's kind of like seatbelts in cars. In those days you would only find a seatbelt now and then-- mashed and crusted with crud, under the seats when you'd be scouring for change. And you would think to yourself as you would be digging around, "I got something. No, wait, it's just the seatbelt. Ooh, what's it got all over it?")

We were both getting thirsty, which was about the time we realized we had forgotten the cooler at the house. Well, that was great. So we had no water or food with us. My hands were getting blistered from the rowing. I was getting hot and tired. Bill kept meekly offering to row and I would snap at him that I was just fine, and then he'd mutter to himself something about me being a control freak. Oh, this was great fun. And of course I could not escape the thought that this would have been a 15-minute ride across the bay, if we'd just had a motor. James would have just snuck and done it. Keith, he was then too little, but by the time he was old enough, Dad would have let him do it without question. But no, I was the one who had to row the boat because I was such a tearer-upper of motors or virtually anything of my Dad's that I might touch or look at.

We finally made it across. We were so parched and dehydrated that we thought we would have to stagger to a house somewhere and knock on a door and beg for water. We pulled up to an old dock on the shore by the old building, which, up close, was a derelict, falling down old wreck. We heard gushing water as we drew near to the shore, and thank God, there was an artesian spring gushing water! We pulled up, got out and drank water until we about foundered ourselves. It was the best water I have ever drunk in my life.

We walked around this huge old building and studied it. The stucco facade was peeling, windows were boarded up, the walls covered with graffiti. On the grounds, the grass was tall and unkempt. Alright, it was time to check the place inside. The doors and windows were all securely boarded up, but there was a small hole in one board--enough room to crawl through. Bill wandered around kind of separate from me. I think I had hurt his feelings with my rowing control freak problem--I tended to do that kind of thing sometimes. I said, "Let's go inside!"

Bill refused to go in. He didn't feel comfortable with that. I was like, "What! We've come all this way!" But he wouldn't go in. He did let me carry his flounder gig for protection, which I guess was his way of extending the olive branch of peace.

I crawled through the hole into the building, which was vast. It was pretty much empty inside, with piles of crumbled plaster which had fallen from the ceilings, but it was amazingly empty. I walked around. The big old place creeped me out pretty bad. I could tell that it had once been opulent, some of the floors were marble. I walked up the stairs, getting a bit worried that they might cave in, but they felt pretty solid. There were lots of small rooms down the hallways, but the few I went into were empty--it was basically an old hotel converted into a monastery. I went all the way up to the top floor, found the stairs up to the cupola at the very top, with its small balcony which looked out in all directions. That was pretty cool. I called down to Bill, who wandered the grounds waiting for me, and waved. Impulsively, I threw his flounder gig down to stick it into the ground. "Hey! he yelled. He went and got the gig, which had landed crooked, and I had bent the tip. "Way to go, Ralph! You tore it up!" Oh well. I had ruined whatever rapport I had patched back up.

Well, that was about all there was to do. I came back down, crawled out, we drank our stomachs as full as possible, then set out rowing again. I think for some reason it was twice as far going back as it was coming. I stubbornly refused to turn over the oars to Bill. We eventually got back. We walked to the next house and used the phone to call Amy Hille to come get us. I think we almost died of exposure.

It was the most retarded adventure ever. My hands were covered in blisters. We were both sunburnt, like the worst ever in our whole lives. Bill Marquez missed the next two days of school due to sun poisoning, and when he finally came back, I busted out laughing because I had never seen anyone that shade of orange. He was such a good guy and I was such a bad friend.

That was the one and only time those oars ever got used. And no, I never took the skiff out, even with the motor. James sneaked, Keith got permission. I, well, whatever...might as well just let that go.