Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7
[Photo by Tod Seelie]
Living on a beach in Brooklyn, Illinois got to be isolating once nearly everybody from the project had left and there weren’t any vehicles around. It was a long bike ride to any bridge we were actually allowed to cross over to the Missouri side on. There was a train bridge right next to where we were but me and Alexis got caught by railroad bulls our second or third time using it and had to stop after that because we’d been formally warned that they’d arrest us for trespassing if they saw us on it again.
This was 2007 so although the 9/11 hysteria had died down significantly there was still a Homeland Security watchlist that the bridge was on. We’d occasionally see tanks and other military vehicles being transported across it so the extra strictness did make sense. There was actually a Homeland Security agent who would come around to complain that we weren’t gone yet but under maritime law we were a “vessel in distress” so he couldn’t do anything about it.
That particular law would be a good loophole to exploit if somebody wanted to squat next to any waterway indefinitely but that’s not what we were doing. We unironically were trying to get going down the river as soon as humanly possible. One night the line that connected us to shore was too short and a stark drop in the water level left us drastically beached. This frustrated the Agent even more:
“What if somebody came here when you weren’t around and pushed this thing back into the water?”
I guess whatever kind of Agent he was didn’t require any kind of background in engineering. We answered that we would be extremely grateful to that someone were it to happen but considering that the raft and everything on top of it weighed in around three tons we wouldn’t be holding our breath. After a while we stopped seeing him come around.
There was one guy who would sometimes give us rides or lend us his truck but the trade off was he was extremely annoying to be around. He was part of a group that dressed up in period costumes for the Lewis and Clark expedition and gave informative speeches to anyone who would listen. One day he showed me a lean to he had constructed from natural materials a little ways up the bank at an oblique angle to the raft.
The revelation that he spent an unknown number of hours essentially spying on us was one more red flag for his pile but we weren’t in any position to be selective. Sometimes Alexis would convince him to lend her his truck for a few errands and then disappear for most of the day. I’d have to babysit him as he got drunk, constantly asked rhetorical questions about when she’d be back and vaguely hinted at extracting some kind of sexual payment in exchange while being too much of a coward to just come out and say it.
On one of these afternoons a pair of Black fishermen offered me a small sturgeon that they’d caught and either didn’t have use for or was below the legal limit. Sturgeon grow to impressive sizes and always look like they are wearing funny mustaches. To prepare them for consumption you cut off the head and then squeeze the flesh out of the leathery layer of outer skin – it’s white and fatty kind of close to the texture of lobster tail meat.
For the rest of the day the Lewis and Clark guy kept making a point to talk about the fish “our African American friends gave you”. Every time he said those two words it was like they were a mysterious morsel of food that had somehow found it’s way into his mouth and he was trying to make sure he didn’t accidentally swallow it while at the same time trying even harder to disguise the fact that he found it unappetizing in the first place.
That kind of behavior was pretty normal for older white men around the Midwest – unless they were just transparently and unashamedly racist. After the railroad security recorded our IDs he had suggested that we bike into the city proper by taking an absurdly long and circuitous route that carefully avoided anything resembling a Black neighborhood.
We pretended to appreciate the advice but the neighborhood next to a train yard was actually a spot we’d already been coming to to explore an abandoned church. It had the remains of a unique kind of pipe organ where all sounds came out of the square shaped wooden structures that are often called train whistles. We each took a few of the small ones and one or two huge ones for bass tones – I felt kind of bad about stripping it but it was already incomplete and scattered and it seemed unlikely it would ever be repaired.
The other thing inside that church was a cache of treasure left by neighborhood kids who had evidently been pretending that the building was an archaeological tomb. It got pretty elaborate – most of the artifacts had been written on in a special script but they’d made sure to leave a key so we could learn it all belonged to King Shabbogabbo. They didn’t have much costume jewelry so they had covered a bunch of plastic poker chips in aluminum foil to look like coins.
I can’t even make up excuses for taking that stuff. King Shabbogabbo’s Curse is definitely on me and Harrison and we deserve it. That lesson can take a long time to learn – that when you discover something that cool there is more value in leaving it behind for future discoverers than taking it with you.
Besides the beaching situation which we could do relatively little about the most pressing order of business for The Bling was locating a larger outboard motor. Harrison found a redneck good old boy who was selling off a massive 150 HP unit. When we went to his workshop/garage he said that I looked like I have “sticky fingers” – while I pretty much never steal from associates or peers I understand that the fact that I don’t bother to hide my interest while looking at strangers’ stuff can be disconcerting.
When we first showed up he was having trouble getting the thing to start. I don’t know a ton about outboards but him and Harrison got it going with a lot of tinkering and connecting a hose while it was mounted on a transom. It was clearly a bonding moment for the two of them as they exchanged high fives and repeated variations on:
“Oh yeah, this baby’s gonna fly!”
Not the first thing that I’d expect a vehicle located on water to do but distinctions didn’t really matter. We’d never even get it started again.
After using Harrison as a pack animal to haul it on board he spray painted it gold and we turned our attentions to the matter of constructing a transom. I’ve written in another piece about our imaginary metal band of the same name and the friendly local who gave us access to his workshop of welders and torches. It’s not in a Rockaway chapter but you can read it here:
Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”
Here’s a few details I left out: the weldy guy lived in a mostly empty former apartment building that had a gigantic but empty beehive in one of the upstairs closets. It reminded me of a Matthew Barney sculpture and you could still catch a tiny drip of honey from the bottom to taste it. He made biodiesel in his garage and one of the byproducts was glycerine.
He told me that he would spread it on the ground in the woods to attract the deer that were the only thing he ate and he probably hunted with a bow. He was warm-hearted, extremely helpful and kind of gave off the vibe of how serial killers are depicted in popular media – everything about him was just a little bit too fastidious and methodical.
Once we had gotten the different scrap metal components of the transom in place we went to mount the motor and accidentally dropped the entire thing into the water which is probably the main reason it didn’t work. As crazy as it is for something designed to operate so close to water to be vulnerable to being fully in it that’s how it was – something designed to operate so close to water was vulnerable to being fully in it.
It probably didn’t help matters that Harrison took the advice of some passing fishermen and tried connecting the battery with the polarities reversed. There was an audible snap and the sound of burning. Whatever wasn’t broken from it’s little dunk got good and fried then.
Alexis stepped up and also found someone online who claimed he could help. He’d be coming by after a regular work day and had a rider of sorts – we needed to have a case of Bud Light waiting. He didn’t look at the motor at all that first night but he did completely change our perspective on fires.
The weather had been turning cold and the beach offered plenty of firewood that we usually burned in a metal barrel on deck. A couple visitors commented on how a fire on board a completely wooden vessel was a recipe for disaster but nothing ever happened. I think the plywood was mostly swollen and saturated from absorbing water by this point.
Our mechanic brought along a friend and they turned their noses up at our dainty barrel and dragged over the entire trunks of several fallen trees. They arranged them into a five pointed star pattern on the beach and got a huge blaze going in the center where they all met. The idea is that you gradually slide the trees inward as more of them burn and from then on that’s exactly what we did.
Most nights the flames grew higher than the towering construction on top of The Bling. We didn’t even have to manually light it again, just stirring the coals and throwing on a couple of smaller pieces in the mornings was enough to get it going again.
The mechanics told us that they were good on a sleeping spot and cuddled up next to their bonfire in matching horse and cowboy pajamas. They had a routine going all night where they were constantly wrestling and calling each other gay before going back to spooning. It reminded me of the sleepovers I used to have with my friend Gabe Saucedo while I was still in High School.
It was pretty cute.
The next morning they were pretty much useless for figuring out anything with our motor. It seemed like the whole mechanic thing was a put on and they just wanted to see our raft, get some free beer and hang out. It was around this time that me and Alexis began to realize The Garden of Bling would never move again and only semi-ironically floated forward the idea of burning it as the only way to get Harrison to accept reality.
We left him to fuss with the clearly broken motor and turned our focus to working on the wooden parts of the body while wearing second hand wetsuits to withstand the river’s increasingly freezing temperatures. There were still some project resources like power tools around but most of them were with The Sweeps across the river.
One night we went over to grab some of them while disgustingly loaded on Sparks. It was still legal to sell alcohol and caffeine in the same beverage and nonstop consumption of both led to this intense tunnel vision I’ve never experienced on anything else. Jacki tagged along with us and was laughing derisively at the modest size of The Sweeps’ campfire. Rather than one roaring flame their pit had a scattering of smaller tongues they were futilely attempting to warm their hands over:
“Look at it! One flame for each!”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 