Docking With Disaster

Conclusion of The Spider Cruise

I let out a sigh of relief as I guided the cabin cruiser to the dock; I could hear Mrs. C. pounding fewer spiders in the back of the boat. We’d been boating on Flathead Lake for less than an hour and it had been a horrid experience. Now our dreadful spider cruise was coming to an end.

I nearly rammed the dock in my hurry to get my family back on land. I shut off the engine and dashed to find my wife. She looked dazed and exhausted, a circle of pasty spider goo surrounding her. Little CJ was still strapped in his car seat and sucking his thumb contentedly, oblivious to what had happened.

I reached for the car seat while Mrs. C. scraped spider guts from her shoes and returned them to her feet. We both sighed with relief as we left the boat. I stepped onto the dock and started walking in the direction of our Fairmont. An opening appeared in the dock. Had I given it any thought I might have guessed the dock was undergoing repairs; a temporary plank had been installed on the water to cross the opening. I stepped onto it and froze before taking a second step. My stomach flipped over when I noticed I was, ever so slowly, moving.

In my hurry to end what had already been a dreadful experience, I’d failed to notice that we weren’t at the spot where we’d departed. Although we’d returned to the bay at the little town of Polson, I’d driven the boat to the wrong side of the harbor. My eyes now fixed on my surroundings with surreal clarity. The dock was a dilapidated wreck. Had I been able to turn around I’d have seen a sign mocking me with bright red letters:

DANGER: DOCK UNSAFE

I’d have the rest of my life to consider my blunder, but at that moment my mind was elsewhere. The plank beneath my feet hadn’t been attached to anything, had merely floated over to the decrepit dock. I was slowly drifting into deeper water, and the plank I was balanced on was slowly sinking beneath my weight.

I can still recall the icy coldness of the water as it filled my shoes. CJ blew a few spit bubbles and giggled. As I contemplated the plunge we were about to take, I regretted our decision to buy CJ the best car seat on the market. CJ was strapped into it like Houdini in a straight jacket, a straight jacket heavy as an anchor.

My swimming skills were modest and the water was about ten feet deep, but it wasn’t the depth that troubled me. The bottom of the harbor was covered with sediment that puffed into little clouds when small fish swam by. What if I lost my grip on CJ when we tipped into the water? What if I couldn’t find him in the cloud of sediment that rose up when we plunged to the bottom? How long could a ten month old baby survive underwater strapped into a heavy car seat? Not long.

I’d never felt so helpless. My heart felt like a block of dry ice; a burning chill radiated through me. I couldn’t twist or turn without lurching toward the water. I couldn’t step forward or backward because the plank was now completely submerged and I was terrified I’d lose my footing. I’d only been a parent for ten months and my foolishness was already jeopardizing my son’s life. I’d entered the hell that only a parent can know.

I felt a gentle tap on my back. I ignored it. Another. Mrs. C., in an astonishing moment of clarity and quick-thinking, hadn’t panicked at the sight of her baby about to plunge to the bottom of the harbor. In a nano moment she’d assessed the situation and figured out what needed to be done. In a pile of debris on the dock, she’d spotted a discarded oar. She was poking me in the back with it. Her voice was calm as she said, “Don’t try to turn around, reach behind you and grasp it. I’ll pull you back!”

The knuckles on my hands were white while grasping the car seat, but I cautiously released a hand and reached for the oar. I’d only drifted about five or six feet from the dock, but the water was now up to my knees. Mrs. C. resisted the temptation to pull hard; reversing direction too quickly might have capsized us. She pulled slowly and methodically, and when I was close enough I plunked down in a seated position on the dock wobbling beneath us. I handed Mrs. C. the baby seat and we quickly scurried off the rickety dock, back into the spider boat for a hop over to the proper dock.

I beat myself up for years, wondering how I could be so stupid as to grab our son and step out of a boat without bothering to look where I was going. Mrs. C. and I didn’t discuss the incident when we returned home. Thirty years later, we still haven’t.

The Spider Cruise

Mrs. Chatterbox is the bravest person I’ve ever known.

Let me explain. First, it’s important to know that she’s terrified of spiders. And with good reason. At the age of ten she was an Army brat growing up in Berlin. Her family lived in a house at the edge of a small forest, and one evening her older brother was playing with the hose and forgot to turn it off. That evening the basement, which was directly below her bedroom, flooded.

Sometime during the night she felt something crawling on her. She pulled the chain on the light bulb dangling overhead. When the light blinked on she saw that her bed was black with spiders. They were on her pillow, her arms and legs, on the chain and light bulb. I’m told she screamed for ten minutes before any sound came out of her mouth.

Flash forward twenty years. Mrs. C. and I are married with a ten month old baby. Her boss offers us his luxury vacation house on Flathead Lake in Montana for a few days and we gladly accept. We were even given permission to use his forty foot motorboat, which cost more than our house. When we arrived, the boat was in storage in the adjoining boathouse, where it had remained, unused, that entire summer. I knew nothing about boats but figured they drove like cars. It had been a long drive from Portland so we settled into the beautiful cabin at the water’s edge. The next day we were anxious for adventure. We packed a picnic lunch, strapped baby CJ into the car seat I removed from our old Fairmont station wagon, and boarded the boat.

If you haven’t seen Flathead Lake, it’s huge; you can barely see to the other side. And it’s shallow in places with rocks sticking up that can rip out the bottom of a boat. So I was being extremely careful, steering the boat around sharp rocks and feeling totally connected with my seafaring ancestors. We were twenty minutes from shore when Mrs. C. started screaming.

I couldn’t see her from where I was steering the boat so I powered down the engine and dashed over to check out the commotion. CJ was strapped into his car seat, crying, but otherwise he looked fine. But Mrs. C: I can only say I’d never seen that look on her face. She had a shoe in each hand. I was about to say something, but then I saw them—spiders, big and brown, nasty looking with orange stripes, hundreds of them, probably more. Mrs. C was too busy to speak; she was whacking spiders with the shoes and stomping on them with her bare feet when they came anywhere near little CJ. Squished spiders circled her in what looked like a relentless offensive to reach the baby. My wife was pounding and stomping so hard she looked like she was performing a ritualistic dance.

The message she shot me with her frantic eyes finally registered; I couldn’t help kill the spiders—they were everywhere— but I could race that boat back to the dock as quickly as humanly possible. And that’s what I did, even though my unfamiliarity with the lake and its projecting rocks slowed us down. I’ll never forget the pounding sound of my wife’s shoes and feet in the back of the boat.

It seemed an eternity, but we were back in the harbor in fifteen minutes. Mrs. C. had already convinced me she was the bravest woman alive, but I was about to learn she was also one of the smartest. My stomach had been in my mouth as I piloted the boat home, and now that we were approaching the dock I started to relax. The Spider Cruise to Hell was coming to an end.

I couldn’t have imagined that in a matter of minutes something would happen capable

of preventing little CJ from seeing his first birthday.

The rest on Wednesday: Docking With Disaster