Boat School
A weekend of high-speed danger and low-wake lunching
We went on a brunch cruise today, which is possibly the most bougie thing I’ve ever typed into this document, but it was a birthday present for my wife, and the weather’s been beautiful, and fuck you, I’m a brunch cruise guy now. What’s not to like about food and being on a boat?
As we watched Toledo’s new giant mural pass by on the left, and the breeze picked up off the water, I made a joke about wanting a season ticket for this thing. It’s ten minutes from my house, a two-hour ride up and back down the river, and it’d be the perfect little diversion on a work-from-home day in the doldrums.
And if I needed a change of scenery for some creative inspiration? Just grab the laptop, sit in the cabin, and write while the Maumee River unfolds in all its brackish splendor. That’d beat going to Starbucks even on a cloudy day.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. Pay a flat rate, call up an hour before cruise time on a day I wanna go, and if there’s an empty seat in the galley, ahoy hoy, I’m writing a novel on a damn boat.
It’s never a bad thing to take a fresh look at where you live, and a good way to do that is to embark on touristy adventures in your own town. I’ve been on the Maumee River before, but not often, and trying to puzzle out where we were in relation to the streets I know was an eye-opening challenge. Rivers remind you how temporary all the crap we pile up on the shore really is, and even at their most developed, give you a sense of the short amount of time since we first poked along the shorelines looking for something to eat and a place to hide from the storms.
The day before, I returned to the home of the guy I bought a pile of CDs from last week. He had another cache of them, a collection of Japanese imports that we came to an agreement on, as well as some movies. When I got there, he opened his garage and told me he was also giving me this giant spinning media shelf, similar to the ones in my basement. It was loaded in the back of my van almost before I realized what was going on.
Why didn’t I say no? I don’t want this rack, and I don’t have space for it. I’m trying to get rid of the ones I have. I guess it’s that last vestige of the guy who furnished an entire apartment with trash pickings in his 20s, or maybe just some inviolate junkman instinct that you don’t leave free anything on the table. Either way, though, now I’ve got a shelf to put up on Marketplace and hopefully get rid of with a minimum of hassle.
The drive into Michigan was the opposite of the serenity on the water – we almost got creamed before we even left Toledo by a guy who cut me off as I was trying to merge onto the expressway, whipped onto the shoulder, passed a semi on the right, and cut it off as he sped away. After a few pleasant drives up there recently, this one brought me right back to Pure Michigan reality – dudes in muscle cars doing 100 and slaloming through traffic, cranky old men camped out in the passing lane doing 55, more lanes closed than open.
We encountered the ultimate main character when we stopped at a Coney Island in a shopping plaza. We saw a rusted-out school bus parked outside, and wondered briefly if the place would be full and service would be slow. No worries there – the owner of the bus had driven there alone, parked directly in the fire lane, and sauntered in for a leisurely sit-down lunch.
When the staff finally figured out what was going on, they informed him he had to move his bus immediately. He threw a fit and stormed out rather than park somewhere else and come back in for his food.
A school bus. In the fire lane. In a busy shopping center, in a high-traffic area, on a Saturday afternoon.
Michigan has a thousand lakes and a million entitled assholes behind the wheel. Maybe it’s time to put the state’s most plentiful resource to work. We have traffic school and defensive driving lessons for minor infractions. Can we sentence Fast and Furious wannabes, road-rage dipshits, texting meanderers, and guys who park school buses in fire lanes to a day on a boat? Maybe having a beer in the sunshine on the upper deck, taking in some scenery, and being reminded of their scale versus the world for two hours would be enough of a reset to get ‘em to stop actively trying to kill the rest of us.
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