Mike
Ball
Read Mike's bio and previous columns here
May 5, 2008
Beer and Engineering:
The Perfect Dock
The Egyptians engineered the Pyramids. The Romans engineered the
Coliseum. Somebody or other apparently engineered Stonehenge.
And every spring my buddy Tom and I engineer The Dock.
For Tom and me, The Dock represents a sacred ritual – kind of like
sacrificing a goat, only with a little less bloodshed, and you don’t get
any lamb chops when you’re done. It’s a ritual we like to perform just
as early in the season as we possibly can.
Now any rational individual – and by “rational individual” I mean “my
wife” – would question the logic of putting on a pair of waders and
spending hours splashing around with dock parts in 40 degree water, when
we could simply wait a few weeks until the water gets warm.
Huh!
So
anyway, on the first halfway decent Saturday every spring Tom and I
assemble all the equipment that is essential to installing a dock – a
couple of wrenches and a six pack. Then we go to work.
The first step is to lay out a careful plan. This consists mostly of
gesturing with the neck of a beer bottle toward a pile of poles and
saying, “I don’t remember those. Were they here last year?”
Next comes the installation of the ceremonial First Section. This always
takes quite a while, because it requires leveling the bank and building
a solid foundation of rocks and old Coke cans, then firmly setting the
first set of poles. After this, we often get as many as three or four
additional sections put in before the whole deal collapses.
Gazing at the wreckage, we develop a theory that if we just had a
different kind of bracket thingy and a better supply of beer, the whole
job would be much more efficient. A trip to the store and several hours
of changing bracket thingies later, we’re back in the water gazing at
more wreckage.
In
the course of much discussion and pointing with the necks of bottles, we
discover that the new bracket thingies are the exact same kind we threw
away last year because when we used them the whole deal would always
collapse.
And so it goes. Finally, after many more hours and trips to the store,
we have what might potentially be a sound dock structure. The only
remaining step is to send one of the kids walking out there to test it.
Now you may wonder why this Beer and Engineering process remains so
complicated year after year. If you don’t, my wife sure does. “It seems
like you two idiots would eventually get a clue,” is how she expresses
it. Our response is very simple:
Huh!
And so, in the gathering dusk, a satisfied conversation marks the
conclusion of an eventually successful dock building project. “Man, what
a great dock,” I say.
“It sure is,” says Tom.
(The sound of bottles clinking together in a victory toast.)
“Hey, I know! Let’s label all the parts so we know just how to do it
next year!”
“Great idea! And we’ll also take pictures of everything, so we’ll have a
record of exactly how it all goes together.”
“Right. But we can do that later. We have all summer.”
(The sound of bottles clinking together in another toast.)
Copyright © 2008,
Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This is Column # MB076.
Request
permission to publish here.
|