I was sitting here thinking what intriguing, exciting, absolutely mind-boggling experience I would pen for this week’s column, when it hit me: swamp rafting.
It was just about this time also that my wife strolled into the room and discovered me in my characteristic thinking pose, which I might add, has taken me years to bring to perfection.
“You sleeping on the typewriter again?” she asked, obviously unfamiliar with traditional thinking styles of writers.
I raised my head nonchalantly and looked her way, with an enigmatic stare on my face.
“What’s that on your face?” she asked. “Looks like you’ve got little impressions of the keys across it.”
“I was just thinking,” I replied. “Do you think readers would be intrigued about swamp rafting?”
“You mean those stupid stories about you and your brothers building a makeshift raft and dragging it across the swamp? What’s the point?
“No one does things like that anymore. They go out and buy a plastic boat and plastic oars, use it a couple of times and then sell it in a yard sale to whoever comes along, usually someone who hasn’t had a plastic boat before.
“They do the same thing, and so on, until it finally cracks or their father runs it over with the car or the dog bites a hole in it, or whatever.
“Then you see it standing up against a garbage can on big trash pick-up day. No one builds rafts anymore. It’s too much work. Why don’t you write about flower-growing. I’ve got some great stories about flowers which…”
Actually, the first raft to traverse the swamp located near our house was more of a boat than a raft. A kind of, well, tar boat. Now the swamp was a vast area that stretched out in all directions from a narrow but dangerous brook which flowed leisurely through the middle.
Fed by the Big Pond located past the Stone Bridge, the brook, though seemingly pastoral in setting, actually was an ingenious trap developed by the swamp over the years to try to catch little boys.
My brothers and I knew this, having heard about such places on the Twilight Zone and other knowledge-based sources. Despite that, however, the attraction of the swamp was just too much. The lure of frogs, turtles, muck, and, of course, water were just too much to pass up.
Everyone knew that monsters hid in swamps along with such things as snakes, snapping turtles and a myriad of other dangerous creatures as evidenced by such famous historical figures as “Swamp Monster,” which for some unknown reason was left out of the history books we used in school.
We had ventured warily as far as the Big Pond, appropriately named because of its size. But, we had never been able to get much further, mostly due to the fact that we refused to walk in the treacherous muck, where, no doubt, monsters lurked.
Having managed to reach the pond with boots on, the rest remained off limits due to the depth of the muck, which increased rapidly after the Stone Bridge.
We were also chicken.
The only solution was a swamp raft.
Knowing little or nothing about either shipbuilding or navigational acumen, we unknowingly constructed the first of what would be many swamp boats.
Construction costs were kept to a bare minimum by utilizing my father’s carpenter tools and some available boards which he obviously had no use for, since they were stacked in the corner of the barn, gathering dust. The finished project, which was about a good-sized board’s width and length in dimension, was smeared with tar in order to make it waterproof.
It seemed perfectly sound, as we hauled it to the swamp for the big launch. And, to tell the truth, for all intents and purposes, it worked quite well for several years before it began to leak like a sieve and wound up sinking in the pond.
In the meantime we spent so much time in the swamp that it seemed like we were getting to know most of the residents by name, including Old Slippery, a large black snake which seemed to turn up almost every time we arrived.
Though we spent hours examining the flora and fauna, however, my neighbor Leo was averse to such expeditions. Most of the fear, we decided, was due to the warnings given him by his mother, who for some reason appeared to deplore mud.
“There are things in that swamp that you don’t want to see,” she would tell Leo.
Usually, Leo would just wait at the edge of the marsh when we went on our swamp adventures, sometimes returning home in the process.
After one particularly strange day, the swamp boat simply sank into the muck, leaving us with no alternative but to try to haul it out. Having gathered the necessary rope, hooks and other materials together, we headed to the swamp, encountering Leo on the way.
“Looks like you’re getting ready to do something interesting,” he surmised.
“Yup,” replied Harry. “We’re pulling the boat out of the swamp.”
Leo waited for awhile on the bank, as we made our way into the swamp, but two things kids can’t resist are tools and boats. We had both.
Meanwhile, we proceeded to get down to business, tossing the hook out into the muck and weeds and dragging it back in hopes of latching on to the boat buried deep in the brown ooze. After several unsuccessful tries, it was agreed that Sam would climb behind the boat and help lift it as we pulled on the rope.
“I’ll go under and lift the back,” he said, standing in the mire. “You pull as hard as you can.”
Just as we gave one last desperate tug on the rope, Leo showed up. The boat lurched to the surface, full of assorted weeds and other muck, including Sam holding on to the back, gasping for air as he came shooting up from its stern covered with weeds and muck himself.
“AAARRRGGGGHHH!” responded Leo, reaching for a big black stick nearby, most likely in hopes of bashing what he apparently concluded was the original swamp monster his mother had warned him about. The stick, however, turned out to be Old Slippery, who was not too keen about being suddenly lifted into the air.
“Heard from Leo lately?” Sam asked several days later.
“Nope. Not since we got the boat out. I never saw anyone cross a swamp like that though.
“Yeah,” agreed Sam. “I’m surprised he was able to resist swamping for so long. I guess it was just in his blood all the time.”
The above is an excerpt from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity… by Dick Martin, a Glocester resident, former Burrillville High School teacher and contributor for NRI NOW.
Martin can be contacted at [email protected].
