As far as I know, I've never inherited anything. Well, that's not exactly true. My grandfather was the proud owner of a very long and very green john boat and when he passed away, my dad wound up with the boat. I'm not sure if it was an actual inheritance, but somehow the boat wound up at our house. So, by default, I guess one could say that I had at least inherited part of said vessel.
As far as I remember, I didn't use the boat very much, Jarrett, my older brother did... often. Occasionally, he would invite me and one of my friends along to fish, float lazily down a river, or perhaps come to within an inch of death by drowning. We mostly came to within an inch of death by drowning. Excitement was never far away when my brother was involved. I suffered many unpleasant circumstances with him growing up, but there is always a silver lining to even the most harrowing of situations. It toughened me up. By my estimation, I had over the course of eighteen years completed the equivalent of Navy SEAL training many times over.
"Of course I can swim! Well, I can swim underwater," Ike cried. Ike was our younger cousin and was often at our house in the summer. "Besides, why do you care if I can swim or not? We'll be in a boat, so I doesn't matter!" In theory, he was right. In reality, he couldn't have been more wrong. I was surprised that Ike had made such a comment without thinking it through first. After all, it was he who'd had an entire pack of fireworks go off in his back pocket only months before. Jarrett was indeed in the vicinity when the explosion took place. So, setting sail with Jarrett certainly carried inevitable risks...namely sinking.
"Underwater? That's how people swim before they drown," Jarrett said with a look of bewilderment. I should have know that his comment was an ominous foreboding of what lay ahead. Jarrett was a few years older than we were, so he was armed with a driver's license and could easily drive us to where our next adventure would unfold. On that particular day, we were loading our old John boat onto dad's truck in anticipation of paddling around a quarry near our house.
My mom and aunt sat on the front porch talking while we loaded all the necessary gear onto the truck. I tossed the one oar we owned into the boat while Jarrett loaded a small cooler filled with sodas. "Do we need life jackets?" Ike asked.
"Life jackets?!!! No, we don't need life jackets. They'll just weigh the boat down. Besides, we can swim...right?" Jarrett barked.
"Uh, yeah, of course," Ike answered nervously.
Our mothers continued to talk on the porch, oblivious to the calamity unfolding in the driveway. Helicopter parenting hadn't been invented in those days. and if it had, they didn't get the memo. We could have been loading an atom bomb onto the truck and they might have possibly muttered, "just be careful," without even looking our way.
"Are we gonna fish?" I asked.
"Naw, we'll just paddle around for awhile," Jarrett said, as he climbed into the driver's seat of the truck. "Get in." Again, I found it odd that we were going to 'paddle' around.
We drove the short distance to the quarry, which had been created by a cement company many years before. The company had closed, and as a result, the quarry filled with water and became a makeshift recreation area for people in our small town.
"Wow! It's huge!" Ike said, as our old truck squeaked to a stop by the water's edge. "Maybe we can just paddle around near the bank. Yeah, let's just paddle near the bank."
My brother and I ignored the paddling near the bank idea, and lowered the boat into the water. "Hop in, off we go!" I said. With that, we set sail or paddle into the quarry.
With no fishing poles and absolutely nothing to do but paddle, we soon felt boredom sweep across the boat. "OK, I'm ready to go. It's boring, besides our moms are going to worry," Ike said.
I was beginning to get bored as well. Jarrett? Well, maybe not. We had managed to anchor in the middle of the quarry and sat, staring at each other while guzzling soda. He was seated to the rear of the boat, I was in the middle and Ike sat in the front. I noticed a crooked smile inching out from the corner of my brother's mouth. I had seen that smile many times before. Usually, it meant that he had either passed gas or was in the early stages of hatching some sinister plan that would require others in the area to pray for survival.
That's when I noticed that my tennis shoes were wet. I stared down at the floor of our vessel and noticed that water was beginning to fill the boat. I also noticed that my brother's head was a foot or so lower than mine. Glancing toward Ike, it became clear that his head was a foot higher than mine. Soon, the water was barely an inch below the rails of the back end and the gentle waves lapped over the sides and into our little aluminum craft. Again, I looked to Jarrett. With a sinister grin, he held the plug up for me to see. He was purposely sinking us! "The bottom of my end of the boat isn't even touching the water," Ike said nervously. "And there's water filling up your end!"
"Looks like we're going down boys!" Jarrett exclaimed. Suddenly, and with very little notice, the old, green, John boat rolled to one side. In an instant, we were overboard. There was nothing left to do but swim.
"I can't swim!!!" Ike cried, trying desperately to cling to the side of our capsized boat.
"Here, hang onto this and try to make it to shore!" I exclaimed, while tossing my flailing cousin the cooler. Thankfully, we had secured the lid and it floated. Mysteriously, I noticed that my brother was missing.
"Where's Jarrett?!!" Ike bellowed, between kicks. "I don't see him!" he screamed. Briefly, I wondered how he could see anything. He was kicking and flailing so violently, that water was flying in every direction. It reminded me of the spray from a speedboat, minus the speed. Thankfully, he managed to flail into shallow water and thus saved his own life. "Where is Jarrett?!!!" he screamed from the safety of the bank.
I dove down to look for my antagonizing brother, and found him under the boat. He was under the capsized vessel, treading water, with his head safely in an air pocket. I popped up beside him. "Tell Ike that you can't find me."
"Why?"
"He said he was bored. Wonder if he's bored now?"
I dove back down and popped up on the outside of the boat. I reported that I was now the oldest child in our family. Jarrett was gone.
Finally, the little joke ended. Ike swore he'd never go anywhere with us again, although he did hug my brother when we finally emerged from the murky water.
When we drove into the driveway, our mothers were still talking on the front porch. We walked past them, sloshing all the way. "Did you have fun boys?" my mom asked.
"Oh, if you call nearly drowning fun, then yes, we had fun," Ike most pitifully said.
"That's nice," they both said, without ever looking at us.
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