April 21, 2009

The Dawn of a (Sort Of) New Dock

Well, it’s that time of year again. The ice dam in the driveway has been replaced by a glob of nearly composted leaves from last autumn, I’ve extracted the last of the season’s Slush Nuggets from the bushes and the first robin of spring has been transformed into a dreamy smile of well-fed satisfaction on the face of the neighbor’s cat.

It’s time to put The Dock back out in the lake!

I’ve written about The Dock before. To review, it’s basically a collection of mismatched metal poles and wooden sections that we have cobbled together over the course of the past 15 years. Just picture a majestic but run-down old barn, with all the wood a deeply weathered gray, bent and warped under the weight of untold seasons of hardship and honest toil. Only it’s a dock.

I inherited a lot of The Dock when I moved here. The guy I bought the house from took his nice dock with him to his new place, and scavenged this one just so there would be something in the water when he sold the house. I’m sure he figured he was just doing me a temporary favor, and that only an idiot would try to keep the thing and use it for 15 years.

To replace the parts that actually disintegrated while we were walking on them and to get further out into the lake, we built some additional sections from scratch, painstakingly copying the old ones so that they were absolutely identical in every way, aside from the length, width, height, weight, color and the occasional flip-flop inadvertently screwed to the planking.

Then we completed The Dock by adding in some sections handed down by friends who were buying new docks of their own and decided to donate the old stuff to me, since none of it was good enough to be used for fire wood.

The bottom line is, since The Dock consists of a pretty much random variety of widths, supports and connections, attaching one section to the next can be kind of like trying to figure out how to hook a railroad freight car to the trailer hitch on a Mazda.

So last year, once we had the dock in the water we decided to take a picture of the completed assembly, to serve as a sort of blueprint for future docks. This would spare us the many hours of standing in the lake in our waders, designing clever engineering solutions and wishing there was an easy way to go to the bathroom when you’re wearing waders.

After many hours of searching for the picture (fortunately you don’t have to wear waders to do that), I found it and examined last year’s Dock. Along with the vital technical information, I also noticed that the thing was sort of crooked.

I can be more specific. In some past years our Dock, when viewed from a distance, would seem to form a curve or a gentle “S” shape. The one in this picture more or less spelled out, in a kind of uneven and pointy-edged script, the word “wünderbar.”

Now while in a way it was kind of cool to have a dock that spoke German, I was more than a little bit embarrassed when I realized that the “umlaut” was actually two ducks who, having become disoriented by all the weaving from side to side and because of some pretty severe leveling problems, had toppled into the water.

I decided right then and there that this year The Dock was going to be as straight and level as I could possibly get it. If those ducks fell off this year, it would be because they had been dipping their little beaks in the neighbor’s brandy.

So, when my friend Tom showed up to tackle The Dock with me, I had my Craftsman® Laser Level all mounted on a tripod and ready to use.

Next week – My friend Tom also has no idea how to use a Craftsman® Laser Level.

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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