Room in the Boat
Part One: The Cut Rope
Mud sucked at my tall rubber boots as I came back down the bank. It was a Saturday at the end of March, a quarter past six in the morning, and the fog still lay thick on the Wabash. The whole river bottom smelled of wet leaves and cold water and the faint diesel that always hangs over the bluff road on fishing mornings. I’d walked up to my truck for the thermos of coffee I’d forgotten on the seat. Five minutes, maybe six. I came back down through the sycamores with the thermos in one hand and my tackle box in the other, already thinking about the first cast.
The rope was still tied to Grandpa’s stake. That was the first thing I noticed, and for a second it made no sense, because the stake was there and the knot was there and the boat was not. The iron stake had been driven into the clay bank in 1979, and it had rusted the color of a pumpkin. Around it was the yellow nylon bow line I’d tied myself an hour earlier, two half hitches and a round turn, the way Grandpa taught me when I was seven.
I set down the thermos and picked up the loose end. It stopped a foot short of the water. It wasn’t frayed the way old rope frays, slow and fuzzy from rubbing. It was clean on one side and ragged on the other, the way rope looks when somebody saws through it with a pocketknife in a hurry.
Out on the brown river, Grandpa’s green jon boat was turning slowly in the current. Fourteen feet of riveted aluminum, painted John Deere green in 1984, with a fifteen-horse Evinrude on the stern and a dent in the starboard bow from a stump in the flood of ‘93. It was sixty yards out and drifting downriver without me, spinning gently like a leaf on a puddle.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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