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Leveling the Dock
for Tim McBride
They came at Noon with hammers and their schemes. Five big guys, each with a perfect plan for how to hoist the 16-foot dock over land and into position at the water’s edge. Having been warned by the neighbors not to touch even the smallest twig of the lake’s most productive crop, they finessed the bulky dock through the ancient blueberries with a heave-ho, a nudge and wiggle, and a few good whacks on the galvanized nails.
Whether it’s a relic sunk in the muck, or sturdy, like ours (donated by a neighbor who—imagine this—had an extra one), a good dock satisfies. Seeing a dock on a riverbank, lakeshore or on an inlet or bay, implies summer and families laughing. A dock with a boat tied to it invites adventure. When I first saw our cottage by the lake, I knew, that if we bought it, I’d need a dock. My wish wasn’t a soft one, as in, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a dock,” the way someone might suggest a skylight or a swing-set for the kids. Nor was it a practical concern. Our only boat was a second-hand canoe, which we can easily haul up onto shore.
No. Mine was a deep-in-the-belly, pressure-in-the-chest sort of need. I needed a dock the way a child might need a thumb-sucked blanket to fall asleep. Needed. Like the need, when the blues hit bad, for two martinis or a half-gallon of ice cream. It makes perfect sense: it was dockside on the Hudson River where, when I was 12, I stole away from my parents to test my first cigarette. I learned to use a casting rod on a dock at a remote Kentucky lake. And later that day, when the adults were busy playing cards, I went to second base with skinny, tan boy whose name I don’t recall. Much later, from a dock at the Jersey Shore, I helped my young sons string chicken necks and we “fished” for crabs. I recently watched a 1933 family movie of my mother toddling in Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva, her pudgy hand gripping the dock to steady her.
Beyond its tug on memory, my dock has another, more subversive function. My dock is my rebellion, my uprising against what Mississippi painter, Walter Anderson, called, “the dominant mode ashore.” Like our lakeside cottage, which is without telephone, TV or Internet, the dock is pure. Made of only 20 4’-wide planks, a couple of 2X8 stringers, 6 posts for legs, and half a box of nails and stainless screws, it’s not a bridge: engineered, grand, a miraculous balance of steel and cable that overcomes entire canyons and mile-wide bays. A dock is modest and, largely, frivolous. If a bridge can be thought of as an answer to an obstacle, a dock is more like a question. Rather than connecting, indeed, propelling us forward, onward with our industry, a dock does not resolve anything...it does not connect but brings us that much closer to the thing that eludes us. Rather than offering security, a dock is more like a middle ground where we must co-reside with the risky unknown.
From the dock’s end I can get a better view of the back cove, a mysterious arm of water leading past the other cottages and onward. From the dock’s edge I am reminded that our small plot of land is really the tip of a peninsula, which, with our cottage at its helm, becomes the bow of a great ship taking us, taking us. If I lie flat on the dock’s hard planks I can see that, under the lake’s thin skin, the world isn’t its familiar blue but olive and brown; minnows dart around and then there is the great surprise of an occasional perch. This is a deep field that we were not, apparently, meant to see entirely. But under there is a pearly string of eggs clinging to a grass strand. It’s from my dock that I can agree with Annie Dillard: the world is – in fact – planted with pennies.
And, I’m not alone in my adoration. Whether in song, poem or story, the dock has served both as potent image and as a plain old place to sit and brood. Otis Redding with his sweet whistle wastes his time on one while navigating his loneliness. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters reminds us about the horrors of war with one of the band’s final songs, “Southampton Dock.” Kerouac and Ginsberg share their soul thoughts on an oily river’s tincan banana dock and Anne Sexton moors her boat at the “dock of the island of God.” But the quintessential image must be Fitzgerald’s: Tom moping about the unknown world and Gatsby’s yearning for the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.
Later that day—long after the sun gave way — we walked to the dock’s edge, slipped from our shirts and slid into the lake’s big bowl of stars. After our swim, dry and protected from the bugs by grandma’s quilts, we stretched out flat and enjoyed our distance from land’s end. Bats swooped for skeeters. August’s Persieds shot across the sky. The dock’s tough planks against our 50-year-old spines reminded us that comfort comes in odd packages. And we dozed, unroofed, under the Dipper’s deep indifferent eye.
Leveling the Dock
for Tim McBride
They came at Noon with hammers and their schemes. Five big guys, each with a perfect plan for how to hoist the 16-foot dock over land and into position at the water’s edge. Having been warned by the neighbors not to touch even the smallest twig of the lake’s most productive crop, they finessed the bulky dock through the ancient blueberries with a heave-ho, a nudge and wiggle, and a few good whacks on the galvanized nails.
Whether it’s a relic sunk in the muck, or sturdy, like ours (donated by a neighbor who—imagine this—had an extra one), a good dock satisfies. Seeing a dock on a riverbank, lakeshore or on an inlet or bay, implies summer and families laughing. A dock with a boat tied to it invites adventure. When I first saw our cottage by the lake, I knew, that if we bought it, I’d need a dock. My wish wasn’t a soft one, as in, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a dock,” the way someone might suggest a skylight or a swing-set for the kids. Nor was it a practical concern. Our only boat was a second-hand canoe, which we can easily haul up onto shore.
No. Mine was a deep-in-the-belly, pressure-in-the-chest sort of need. I needed a dock the way a child might need a thumb-sucked blanket to fall asleep. Needed. Like the need, when the blues hit bad, for two martinis or a half-gallon of ice cream. It makes perfect sense: it was dockside on the Hudson River where, when I was 12, I stole away from my parents to test my first cigarette. I learned to use a casting rod on a dock at a remote Kentucky lake. And later that day, when the adults were busy playing cards, I went to second base with skinny, tan boy whose name I don’t recall. Much later, from a dock at the Jersey Shore, I helped my young sons string chicken necks and we “fished” for crabs. I recently watched a 1933 family movie of my mother toddling in Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva, her pudgy hand gripping the dock to steady her.
Beyond its tug on memory, my dock has another, more subversive function. My dock is my rebellion, my uprising against what Mississippi painter, Walter Anderson, called, “the dominant mode ashore.” Like our lakeside cottage, which is without telephone, TV or Internet, the dock is pure. Made of only 20 4’-wide planks, a couple of 2X8 stringers, 6 posts for legs, and half a box of nails and stainless screws, it’s not a bridge: engineered, grand, a miraculous balance of steel and cable that overcomes entire canyons and mile-wide bays. A dock is modest and, largely, frivolous. If a bridge can be thought of as an answer to an obstacle, a dock is more like a question. Rather than connecting, indeed, propelling us forward, onward with our industry, a dock does not resolve anything...it does not connect but brings us that much closer to the thing that eludes us. Rather than offering security, a dock is more like a middle ground where we must co-reside with the risky unknown.
From the dock’s end I can get a better view of the back cove, a mysterious arm of water leading past the other cottages and onward. From the dock’s edge I am reminded that our small plot of land is really the tip of a peninsula, which, with our cottage at its helm, becomes the bow of a great ship taking us, taking us. If I lie flat on the dock’s hard planks I can see that, under the lake’s thin skin, the world isn’t its familiar blue but olive and brown; minnows dart around and then there is the great surprise of an occasional perch. This is a deep field that we were not, apparently, meant to see entirely. But under there is a pearly string of eggs clinging to a grass strand. It’s from my dock that I can agree with Annie Dillard: the world is – in fact – planted with pennies.
And, I’m not alone in my adoration. Whether in song, poem or story, the dock has served both as potent image and as a plain old place to sit and brood. Otis Redding with his sweet whistle wastes his time on one while navigating his loneliness. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters reminds us about the horrors of war with one of the band’s final songs, “Southampton Dock.” Kerouac and Ginsberg share their soul thoughts on an oily river’s tincan banana dock and Anne Sexton moors her boat at the “dock of the island of God.” But the quintessential image must be Fitzgerald’s: Tom moping about the unknown world and Gatsby’s yearning for the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.
Later that day—long after the sun gave way — we walked to the dock’s edge, slipped from our shirts and slid into the lake’s big bowl of stars. After our swim, dry and protected from the bugs by grandma’s quilts, we stretched out flat and enjoyed our distance from land’s end. Bats swooped for skeeters. August’s Persieds shot across the sky. The dock’s tough planks against our 50-year-old spines reminded us that comfort comes in odd packages. And we dozed, unroofed, under the Dipper’s deep indifferent eye.
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