My neighbors had an old rowboat that sat chained to a tree
for years and was never used. At one time I actually thought it was holding up
the tree. Then they sold the place and the old boat went with it. The new
family promptly put it in the lake and put an equally old motor on it and
christened it the “Queen Mary.” She sat there tied to the dock with the big
boys, proud once more to be part of the fleet. When the family came up for the
weekend you would see their teenage son Jack, take his fishing pole and fire up
that smoky old Johnson and set a course for the prime fishing grounds. The
queen never looked prouder.
Then a few weeks ago they took a vacation to California and
the shoreline and dock were deserted, all except for the Queen tied to her
moorings. On Thursday of that week we got three inches of rain and the Queen
now filled to the gunnels with rainwater had a slight list to port but her bow
still stood proud and beckoning to the fishing flats of Big Pine. An area rivaled
only by the grand banks of the western Atlantic. I noticed all of this from my
house high above the boat but felt the Queen had weathered worse things, so I
paid scant attention to the predicament she was in. That put me somewhere in
the company of those two guys that were in the crows-nest telling jokes and
smoking English tobacco that fateful night when the Titanic kissed that iceberg
with such tragic results. Never the less it was late, so I went to bed.
The next morning dawned damp and foggy with a mist that hung
over the lake and you could scant see the shoreline. But as the sun came up and
the mist burned off, the horror of it all came home. Sometime during the night,
the Queen Mary had quietly sunk into the depths of Big Pine Lake. I walked to
the dock with a heavy heart. She didn’t deserve this. The fog was still hugging
the lake and somehow in the back of my mind, and coming out of the mist I could
hear Celine Dion singing, “My heart will go on.” There was an image of a man
standing on the end of that ghostly dock, shrouded in the mist that I swear
looked just like Leonardo DiCaprio. Kate Winslet must have gone down with the
boat I reasoned. I was horror struck.
The next morning the salvage crew-- namely me-- came and
raised the queen once more. With a gurgling she came up, bow first. The debris
field bubbling up out of the depths, with her once proud bow. Unlike the
Titanic she had been found right away and the depths allowed for rapid
recovery. Her fuel tank came first, upside down and a snicker wrapper followed.
Then a wooden oar and a Styrofoam cup with the words, “night crawlers” written
on the side of it. I could only think, “Oh if that old gal could talk, the
stories she would tell.” Thankfully no Kate Winslet showed up.
Winched to shore and salvaged the Queen went to dry dock and
was re -outfitted. Her holds and bilges were drained. Her fuel tank put back in
place and her three horse Johnson dried out. Today she sits snuggly back in her
berth, not a casualty like the Titanic but a proud survivor of a near tragedy
in the notorious depths of Big Pine Lake. Ah yes my friends. May we all utter
together-“ God save the Queen Mary.”
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