Watercraft

Remember these?

We’re down to just one, now -- that rotten, soggy, fern-loving motorboat -- after Demolition Dave found a good home for the pontoon.

The fiberglass runabout remains a challenge. I've called boat dealers, sent e-mails to recyclers and posted messages on listservs.

Even the plant manager at the Larson boat manufacturer in Little Falls, Minn., told me they send excess fiberglass to the landfill.

Atomic Recycling in Minneapolis – which touts itself as the grand “green” recycler of waste – sent me an email with this bright "solution":

“The only thing I could suggest is to get a dumpster and put it in there. If you get a big enough one you could put it in whole. Let me know if I can help. Have a great day.”

This is what I’m up against.

It’s a bit mind blowing, especially when you consider that there are more than 863,000 boats registered in Minnesota -- more per capita than Florida. Boats are said to last 400 years in the landfill, a bit of hyperbole, but who's counting?

I told my contact at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency that we were thinking about sawing up the boat and tossing it bit-by-bit into our garbage cans to be trucked to the waste burner.

“At least it’s upstream,” she said, a bit sheepishly.

Life everlasting

Back when I was scoping out distressed lake cabins, my friend Ramona was trying to regain her footing. Her husband and my chum, William, had died two years earlier after a bruising battle with COPD.  Neither of us had a clue how much the earth would shift when William departed this mortal life.

William was a big-brain Mensa who never made it to college. He spent four decades working at a suburban stove factory. We’ll never really know whether his job, his cigarettes or a mean trick of DNA led to the emphysema and cascading health problems that sucked the breath out of him one February day.

William thought of “life everlasting” in practical terms, not religious ones. He believed that each of us lives on in another’s memories, stories and things left behind.

And so it is with the Loveless canoe.

Out of the blue last summer, Ramona offered to give me William’s canoe – a massive 17-foot Alumacraft, built in 1968. The red paint is scarred after decades of  rough-and-rocky river trips William had taken in his healthier days.

Last weekend, Ramona and I paddled the canoe from the boat launch at the southern end of Loveless Lake to my place on the northwestern side. We made light of it, but in reality it was a pretty heavy deal.

William would have loved the irony of his canoe landing on neglected property at a place called Loveless.

Chris says we're taking the canoe to its retirement home, where the waters are calm, the bottom is sandy and the bass plentiful.

Everybody say Amen.

Force of nature

Here's the Loveless Lake cabin in its current state. The day Chris and Dave knocked down the place, I didn't have the presence of mind to take a photo that showed how this mighty tree became the defensive lineman on our goal-line drive.

That tree is another of the many headscratchers here. Maybe no one thought the sapling in front of the living room window would get so big. Or maybe the place has been empty for so long that nature reclaimed its space with a vengeance.

Whatever the reason, I'm doubly committed to saving this giant tree when (if) construction starts.

Two men and a sledgehammer

Today’s post brought to you by the letter D. For Destroy. And for Dave, who gave up his Saturday for the thrill of a tear-down at Loveless Lake.

We were praying for sunshine on Demolition Day, but Mother Nature delivered rain. We were hoping for extra horsepower from friends with big trucks, but they didn’t show. We assumed the rotten, cracked and crumbling cabin would fall pretty easily, but the old girl put up a good fight.

In the end she came down – most of her, anyway -- with Chris and Dave taking turns swinging the sledgehammer.

The guys decided the best approach would be to take down the cabin in sections, starting with the kitchen in front. Dave wanted to separate the kitchen from the crumbling concrete bock in back, so he shoveled off a strip of mossy shingles and cut through the roof with his chainsaw like a slice of cake.

It was a macho beginning.

Hooking a chain and "come-along" to the corner proved worthless. It only pulled out the rotten 2x4s. After a few tries, the come-along got fussy, the guys got frustrated, and it was time to start swinging.

One-by-one, Chris and Dave knocked out the sticks. Slowly, finally, gravity did its work. (Wouldn’t you know, the part Dave sawed stayed standing?)

But all the staging and strategizing -- and an unplanned run back to Menards for a heavy chain -- had taken longer than we'd expected. It was time to leave. Even though no one was satisfied with the half-finished job, we reluctantly hauled gear up the hill to the truck. 

The sun came out.

Chris and Dave stood before the main portion of the house, surveying its shift after the kitchen collapse. They began saying things like, “Hmmmm, seems like a few taps here and this thing could fall pretty easily.”

Next thing I knew, they were swinging again.

And again. And again. Until you began to wonder what on earth was holding the place up.

Finally, Dave hit the winning swing, and ran like hell as soon as he connected. Talk about adrenalin rush! The structure moaned, and glass crashed from windows and an old videogame we’d left inside.

That big ole tree growing against the front saved it from smashing completely to the ground, which somehow seemed a fitting end to our day.

So now, a whole new set of clean-up challenges begins. I devolved into a few minutes of panic after taking in the current scene, but soon remembered that somehow -- inch by inch -- we'd cleaned up the hell hole of a place on the inside. We could break it down the same way with the carnage of the tear down.

I envision a huge bonfire on the concrete floor of the former living room in the not-so-distant future.

And if a cabin ever gets built here, Dave and his family have first dibs.