Down Joe Bald Road

Dad's Ozark Ark

Folly Me

Part 3 of 3

By James F. (Jim ) Barrett
©2001

      The green-sabot, Dutch-shoe, planter-boat roared across Table Rock Lake, its giant (and gaunt) engine blasting through its abbreviated muffling system, oily water and blue exhaust streaming in its practically non-existent wake. The bottom of the boat's plywood hull was so flat that it skimmed over the water like a skipped stone. It also had, as Dad and Brother soon discovered, very odd steering capabilities and caprices.

      Using the shiny brass wheel to turn the giant outboard caused the stern to whip instantly and alarmingly in the opposite direction. It took some while for the rest of the boat to follow the command. At times the green sabot skimmed at thirty or forty knots, sideways across the light surf. The boat had no keel, unless one considered a flat-laid two-by-four to be a keel. At speed, turning the wheel was like steering an automobile on glare ice. It produced most interesting and quite unpredictable results.

      Other boaters, passing the shiny green monstrosity, were a bit startled to see it zipping along broadside on. Other speed boats did that same maneuver, but only for a few feet, not for hundreds of yards, as did the green sabot. Of course, the boat would have answered her helm (another neat nautical term) better at a much slower speed. Unfortunately, the unusual landing boat outboard motor ran at only two speeds, wide open and dead stop. If one were to arrive within the week, one ran the skeletal engine at full bore, its four giant bucket pistons pounding away at a frantic pace.

      After some experimentation, Dad found that he could push the stern opposite to the desired direction of travel with ease. Then, when the stern was 180 degrees from the planned route, he spun the brass wheel to center-board (love them sailing words) and the huge brass prop would snap the boat out of its skid and fling it in the hoped for direction. It was the most odd way of navigating ever devised, but it worked, and that's all that the old man cared about. The niceties of skilled navigating were not a part of Dad's concern. Getting there was the game.

      While Father, stripped railroader's hat turned backward on his thinly gray haired scalp, zipped the green monstrosity along at warp speed, Brother sat on the beer cooler, sucking up brews and swaying violently from left to right. As Father experimented with his driving techniques, Brother softly cursed to himself. He also uttered an occasional prayer as the green sabot hurtled toward a towering houseboat's gigantic wake waves. However, broadside or head on, the planter flew over the steepest of waves with aplomb.

      Sometimes the ride was like a mad roller-coaster's, but what the heck, there was lots of beer, the tanks were full and there were life preservers at hand. Most importantly, Brother grinned to himself, the old man was having the very time of his life. He'd always wanted a trailered power boat, and now he had one. Probably one of the most overpowered and uniquely formed boats on Table Rock Lake. Certainly the only bright Sinclair-green one, for sure.

      After crossing from the Kimberling Marina, going beneath the Kimberling Bridge, rounding several points and wildly spinning back and forth across their erratic path, Dad and Brother, in the green planter, approached Little Fisher Creek cove. At the head of this cove lay the thirty acres (m/l, as the real estate people would say) that Dad and Mom had recently acquired. It was to this objective which they wildly hurtled.

      Dad wanted to view his domain from the vantage point of the lake's surface. He wanted to glory in its lakeside qualities and dream of its vast potential for development. In his mind's eye he could already see bait stores, grocery stores, towering houses, expensive lots, paved roads winding through the woods and all manner of other "citified" dreams.

      The ever popular United States Army Corps of Engineers, when they built Table Rock Lake, had removed very few of the standing trees in the dense woods that cloaked the hills and valleys now submerged beneath the placid blue waters. In the first year of immersion, they had all died, of course. Now they stood, still firmly rooted, bare of limb, towering often one hundred feet above the lake bottom. Where the water was less deep than the height of the trees, they protruded from the surface into the air.

      In some places the trees were nearly totally exposed. In others they were totally submerged. In the worst places they were just below the surface of the water, waiting for the unwary boater or water-skier to come their way. Fisher Creek cove was a prime example of all three cases.

      As the three wild men (Dad, Brother and the sabot) rounded the last peninsula and headed up the creek, they began to encounter various examples of the deceased, but still in place, tree life. With the boat running wide open at some forty knots (don't you get off on them navy-like terms?) they blasted through the first few encounters. The trees furthest out in the lake extended their topmost branches only a few feet above the surface and the sabot-planter ripped through them with little effort.

      As they plunged on, the branches became taller and thicker. Brother hoisted himself from the cooler and staggered over to the outboard engine. He reached down and flipped over one of the several strange levers. The engine instantly went to idle (its only other speed) and the green sabot quickly lost all headway. Father, continuing at forty knots, slammed into the brass wheel and lost his trainman's stripped hat.

      "What'n the blue-eyed world?" he exclaimed, as he untangled himself and bent over for his beloved cap. "Why'd you do that?"

      "'Cause," Brother replied, waving his beer can at the surroundings, "you can't see where you're going and we're liable to end up on the bank."

      "The old man squinted at him through his round, gold-rimmed spectacles and carefully adjusted his stripped cap. "Yeah, probably you're right. Gimme a beer. Whatcha got in mind?"

      The planter drifted slowly up the cove, passing by tree limbs that protruded six to eight feet above the lake. They were thin at this height, but they still raked and scraped at the boat as it pushed through them.

      Brother took a thoughtful pull at his beer. "Well, I'm taller. I'll drive. I can pretty much see over the top of the cabin. You run the engine."

      "Taller?" The old man snorted, matching Brother pull for pull on the beer. "You ain't more'n an inch higher than me! You keep runnin' the engine an' I'll drive. I like drivin'. It's the first boat I ever drove."

      Brother was always right (as earlier mentioned) and was not to be put off. "Inch or foot, I'll drive from here on in. You're too darn wild."

      Them was fightin' words to the old man. He felt that he was now master of the technique of steering the green sabot and wasn't about to give up without a fight. The argument raged on through two more beers. It ended up with Brother at the wheel, the engine running at the higher of its two speeds and Father sitting complacently atop the cabin, directing the show, as he loved to do.

      Whether it was their lack of experience, their lack of foresight, their lack of awareness regarding the increasing height-above-water of the tree limbs, or the plenitude of brew, they soon found themselves plunging up Little Fisher Creek cove at forty knots. Brother, totally ignoring Father's unending stream of shouted directions and frantic hand signals, twirled the shiny brass wheel and sent the green planter sabot skipping up the cove. Neither he nor Dad, in their child-like excitement, noticed that the trees were gradually becoming higher and higher above water.

      Brother rather skillfully rounded a couple of turns and plunged the boat up the next stretch. Unfortunately, the next stretch lay over a much more shallow portion of the lake. Consequently, the trees were twenty to thirty feet out of the water and the limbs were neither thin nor pointed straight up. They were often as thick as a man's leg and grew in all directions, as tree limbs are wont to do. In a trice, the three idiots (Father, Brother and the monstrosity) found themselves driving through a far less than enchanted forest at better than forty miles an hour.

      Father, of course, saw the danger before Brother. After all, he was sitting atop the flat roofed green cabin, totally exposed. Brother was hidden behind the cabin's protection and could see very little of anything, even though he claimed to be much taller than Dad. Brother could see enough of the cove, peering around the side of the cabin, to be self assured that all was well. Had he been able to look around the other side, he would have seen the approaching trees. In this wise, they plunged wildly on, Father screaming warnings as loudly as his cracked old voice would permit, Brother blissfully watching the gray-green water skim by at forty knots and the over-powered sabot's huge engine howling at the top of its four pistoned lungs.

      The inevitable happened. Father sat in horrified fascination as the boat skimmed directly toward a grove of only partially submerged oak trees. He felt badly, because he could recall no prayers from his childhood, for he was certain that his life was now over. Brother was sipping a fresh beer, watching the water whip by and marveling that the gross landing boat engine was running so smoothly. He was contemplating a way to adjust its speed, deafened to Father's now weak but frantic bleats atop the roof, as they plowed into the first giant submerged oak.

      Heard above the throaty roar of the engine, the snapping of limbs and the scraping of the hull was like the trumpets of doom. Brother snapped from his reverie in time to see Father hurtle overhead, totally enmeshed in a thicket of limbs. As he marveled at that amazing event, the scraping and snapping increased in intensity, accompanied by a rain of twigs and small limbs that began to fill the cockpit of the green sabot planter boat.

      In far less time than it takes to relate, the boat plunged to its grand finale. Much to my brother's bemused amazement, a giant oak limb suddenly emerged from the cabin's doorway and extended over the cockpit and the still thundering engine. With a smack and a slam, the boat ground to a sudden stop. Brother unwound himself from the wheel and staggered back to the roaring engine. He flipped the throttle and choke levers to "off" and stood, wavering, in total amazement, as the engine's blast ceased echoing from the surrounding hills.

      He stood thus for a moment or two, staring at the huge oak limb that now shared the deck area with him. In his sub-conscious, he heard the echoes die away, but one plaintive sound continued to intrude on the peace of the dead tree filled cove.

      The old man dangled from his web of tree limbs and screamed invectives at Brother, with little or no apparent effect. His son was tentatively tapping at the oak limb and seemed to care for nothing else at the moment. Finally, the initial shock wore off and Brother turned to find the source of the screams. When he saw the old man swinging and threshing among the dead tree limbs, his eyes popped open and his wandering mind returned to his skull. He had seen Dad pass by at speed, but it hadn't really registered until this moment.

      Father saw that his middle son had finally noticed his plight. "Well, you gonna just stand there, or are you gonna get me outa this here tree?"

      "How?" Was all Brother could think to say. "How?"

      The old man ceased his threshing and looked around, studying his situation. "Is the boat clear stuck?" He asked.

vBrother regarded the huge limb and replied, "Yup, I think so. Maybe sinkin' again, I don't really know."

      Dad was not to be put off. "There's a little chain saw in a tin box in the cabin. I brought it to work on the property, if we needed it. Use it to get rid of them limbs and come back here for me - preferably before dark!"

      Brother, still in a stupor, brought out the chain saw, started it and began rapidly hacking up the offending limbs. He stopped for a breath, pulled a beer from the tipped over cooler, put one fist on his hip and stood, head canted to the side, staring at Dad. The insanity of the situation finally overpowered his distress. He began to chuckle deep in his stomach. Then it grew to his chest, his throat, and finally burst from his mouth in whooping gales of laughter that spewed foaming beer over the tree trash.

      At first, Dad wasn't amused, but the scene and Brother's hilarity soon became overpowering. He had restored his hanging spectacles to his eyes, found that his treasured trainman's cap was still in place and that he had no apparently broken bones. At first he snickered, then laughed, then howled along with Brother. His activity threatened to shake him loose from the tree, but he couldn't help himself.

      In a short time, Brother had the tree limbs cut up and dumped overboard. With a paddle he backed the green sabot down the creek to where Dad still hung in the tree. He positioned the boat under Father's perch, fired up the tiny chain saw and dropped the old man to the deck.

      For a long while they let the crazy green boat drift where it would as they sat amid the limb and twig trash, drank copiously of the cold beers, slapped each other on the shoulders, recalled each moment of the event and howled with good old fashioned laughter. Much later, they managed to row the boat up the cove, took lots of pictures for Mom to view, gazed upon the wonderful new property, talked of many things and dreamed many a nice day dream.

      All in good time, they paddled the green sabot down the cove. Clear of the trees, they started it up and roared wide open across Table Rock Lake. The glorious Ozark Mountain sun setting behind them was making their pitiful wake a stream of red gold. Thus ended the maiden voyage of the green-sabot planter-boat and the two amateur mariner adventurers from Kansas City.