I have a friend who has recently started telling me that he dreams of owning a boat. This seems to me a very curious thing, because this man, who is closing in on 50 and whom I have known for 40 years, has never before expressed an interest in boats.
My friend would like to have a boat, he says, “so I can take people on fishing trips in Bimini or just float out on the lake.”
I found myself thinking of this friend as Osgood and I, on one of our aimless jaunts, found ourselves strolling one afternoon past Belmont Harbor.
It was a beautiful day, with a get-your-sweater chill carried by a stiff wind and a sky that was that sunny bright blue that makes everything below it seem to sparkle.
The harbor was a sparsely populated place. Boats bobbed on the gentle waves. It was quiet and the only sound one could hear was the rhythmic slap of water against what few boats remained in the harbor.
We could see some of the boat names and began playing a game, trying to match names to the professions or hobbies of owners.
“Blood Vessel” we imagined might belong to a doctor.
“Breath Taking” was perhaps the boat of a person who had successfully quit smoking.
In the distance, a bulldozer reshaped the earth at the eastern edge of the harbor, working around a few trees that were growing quickly barren in the breeze.
In the summer, I often pass the harbor and have started to think of it as a lively neighborhood, one of wildly varying vessels — large and small, sail and motor — but all of them tied together by water.
The lake is, in a sense, a stage that never changes. Yes, there are alterations in its color and its moods. But unlike the city that fronts it — noisy and chaotic with uncertainties around every corner and behind every door — it is an always thing. It was born 18,000 years ago with the melting of the last Ice Age, and took its present shape some 10,000 years ago.
“Where do the boats go in winter?” Osgood asked. I didn’t have an answer.
In a while the water will freeze and boaters, wherever they go in winter, will grow increasingly anxious, waiting for the day when their boats can go back on the lake and they can be back on their familiar stage — renewed.
Really, now, who wouldn’t want a boat?
