Blackmail Fodder & My Father's Boat
A weekend in my dad's old fishing boat prompts me to blow 33 years of dust off the novel I wrote as a kid
They say you can’t ever really go back, right? Well, I’ve found that to be true, but sometimes you can dive into the depths of your history and bring back the most astounding lost treasures to the surface of your NOW by visiting the locations of your THEN.
Once upon a time, my father had a boat. It was a small, simple fishing boat. (We come from Minnesota, don’tcha know?) I hadn’t been in that boat since I was…oh, geez. Maybe twelve. We’re talking 1985 here. If that’s fuzzy to you, I was the same age as the younger kids in The Goonies and E.T.
Now that I think about it, it’s even possible that I hadn’t been out on the water in that boat since I was ten or eleven because, while I was growing up, I was NOT Daddy’s Girl.
A born and bred Minnesota Boy, he is Mr. Fisherman and Mr. Hunter. He did taxidermy and woodburning. Son of a mechanic and carpenter, he is the eternal jerry-rigger, forever inventing, building, renovating, puttering, and generally fixing all newel posts that need fixing.
(If you don’t know that reference, it comes from one of our family’s primary communication mediums: lines from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.)
No? Here. I’ll just…
Yeahhhh.
In contrast to Clark-Sparky, my father is truly a handyman and amateur engineer.
Then there’s me. Arsy-fartsy dancer athlete, bookish musician and actress, weirdo writer nerd who does most of her jerry-rigging with needle and thread. For most of my life, I was 100% Mommy’s Girl.
It’s not that she and I are un-handy. We’re not. We’re just better at assisting the handyman than being the primary architect of the projects. We’re also not indoor girls, in spite of our bookishness. We did hiking, sledding, skating (the roller and the icy varieties), gardening, swimming, bocce ball and other yard games. She loved cross-country skiing; I loved waterskiing. She loved horseshoes; I loved sandlot volleyball. We both enjoyed fishing with Dad as well.
But as much as I loved this last pursuit, I abandoned it somewhere around nine or ten. There are many reasons. We’ll get into those. But not today.
Today we need to talk about the boat.
When my parents moved from Minnesota to Arkansas around 2008, Dad sold his little red boat to his brother-in-law and got a big, swanky Lund. Eventually, he switched to a small, swanky fishing kayak with a gazillion bells, whistles, and luxuries he outfitted himself.
That was a sweet craft.
But my father is in his mid-70s now, so trying to make it up to his primo fishing haunts—AND BACK after a whole day on the water?
The kayak needed to go. He had also acquired a new wanna-be-fishing partner: Re-Enter The Daughter.
DADDY & DAUGHTER - A REPRISE LONG OVERDUE
Ever since I followed my parents to Arkansas amidst the Year of Chronic Seizures in 2013, my father and I have developed quite the Daddy-Daughter rhythm. It started with the neurological revocation of my driving clearance and my need to continue eating. Every week, he would pick me up for his standard grocery run. This includes recycling and any other local errands. It also includes breakfast.
Eventually, we got my seizures under control and I got my driving clearance back. Yet the weekly grocery runs and the Daddy-Daughter breakfasts remain to this day.
Thus did my father and I rekindle a long-lost kinship. We had just started to reconnect shortly before I moved away from my birthplace in Duluth, took a pit-stop in Minneapolis where my life came crashing down on my head, and beat-feet to Colorado for the next seventeen years.
But in the six months between graduating from college and moving to Minneapolis, Dad and I had started doing a weekly lunch together. During college I’d worked part-time in the summers at the oil company where he was a purchasing agent. So when they moved his office across the Twin Ports bridge from Superior, WI to Duluth, MN, we started getting together once a week.
It was the first candle flame of reconciliation in an estranged, sometimes tense—occasionally volatile—relationship between the hotheaded Fire Sign, Peter “Frenchie” Perfect and his only spawn, a different kind of Fire Sign, Polly “Frenchie Junior” Perfect.
While living in my parents’ house, Dad and I just could not get along. We’re too alike, aggravated by all the ways in which I naturally operate in my mother’s rhythms, not his.
My move out from under his roof gave us a much needed breather from each other. My move to Colorado formed my own wings and the certainty of how I really operate as an adult. So my move to Arkansas has allowed us to seal up those old relationship cracks in gold with every grocery run, and every bout of sweating it out under my car, my furnace, or my rotting deck.
And now, every bout of sweating it out in our new boat.
Which is actually that old red boat.
THE NEW OLD BOAT
Last summer, we lost my uncle—R.I.P. Kenny. We miss you! Dad had been plotting the retirement of his fishing kayak for a couple years before that, so when the opportunity came to buy back his old boat from his sister, he didn’t hesitate. My cousin drove it down and my dad set to work renovating that thing with all his Peter Perfect heart.
Polly Perfect Jr. provided the usual assistance on a boatload of it.
Although it was originally red, it is technically a Bluefin. We now call it the Blackfin. Its nickname is “Wallichaser.”
Dad and I set out on the water a couple months ago. Okay, more like we darted out on the whitecaps between storms. Every trip since then has been in the doldrums under the scorching sun.
Doesn’t matter.
It’s really more about bonding time and learning the new-old boat. It’s about discovering the bugs and tweaking the rhythms—of the boat’s operation, as well as being all cramped up together for multiple nights in a teensy cabin room.
It’s been really awesome, because I can fall right into those old modes of operation without breaking a sweat. As an adult with her own house and lifestyle, I now have no issue with conforming to my dad’s well-oiled fishing trip mechanism. I mean, he’s only been developing it for sixty-five years. Plus, a bunch of his modes really are mine, augmented with my mom’s artistic flair, so it’s quite natural.
In this post-length, I can't begin to do justice to the amount of healing and joy that has taken place in these trips, in moving closer to my parents, in this forested, water-bedazzled wonderland called the Ozarks.
Huh. Good thing I have an entire Substack for that. (Okay, technically, it will take me two Stacks to do it justice, because there are the stories, both fictional and non, and there is the 5 Elements System that is my creative process, dance style, and teaching modality.)1
THE JAWS THEME RUMBLES UNDER THE SURFACE
During that first fishing trip, something else happened that I never could have imagined in twenty millennia.
No shit, there I was, kicked back in my comfy co-cap’n seat on the Blackfin. The wind gusts had died down after lunch. The sun had peeked out and the rocking of the boat had lulled me into the kind of paradise that only nature’s hush can deliver. Stress slid off me and crashed into smithereens like the edges of a melting glacier. The sunlight sparkled on the water. That long-remembered lapping sound beat out a gentle, metallic rhythm against the sides of the boat. Nostalgia shot a delighted smile across my face.
And then it happened.
Memory after memory after memory.
Images. Sounds. Voices. Laughter. Scents. Sensations. Ka-BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
The Lake. Mom. Dad. Crappie fishing in a barrel between weeds. The old blue van. Thunderstorms. Yellow jigs. The Rec Room. Waterskiing. Volleyball. Pinball. Foosball. The new tan van. Air Supply. Hour after hour of scribbling fiction in a notebook on the bed in the back of the van. Grandma and Grandpa. The Pacific Coastal Highway. Rock. Waves. Crashing. Sunset.
Thus did the Mandate From the Muse descend upon me.
When you get home, you need to take out that ratty yellow folder you’ve had since your junior year of high school. You need to pull out all those pages of dot-matrix printout and re-read what’s on those floppy disks.
And I don’t mean the hardback kind. I mean genuine big, black, flopping floppy disks.
I have two of them. They’re stuffed with the first novel I ever wrote from the time I was thirteen until I finished it at seventeen.
I hadn’t read that thing since I set it aside in eleventh grade, because gladiators, historical fiction, and fantasy world-building hijacked my writing existence.2 I’ve always just written off this teenage romance and adventure tale as blackmail fodder—something I would never let any person on the planet glimpse, much less read.
I mean, come on. You know what they say about your first novel. It’s just practice. It’s merely the exercise of proving to yourself that you have the chops and the stamina to write a book-length story.
Well, I proved that midway through high school.
After Dad and I came home from that first trip chasing walleyes, I curled up on the couch and read the first 65,000 words I ever wrote consecutively. It’s awful. Just terrible. I laughed my ass off at my teenage self.
But I also shocked myself with what I instinctually knew how to do before I was even old enough to drive, have sex, or drink alcohol.
I knew how to tell a story.
There are skeletons in those dot-matrix pages. Since they were conceived in 1986 amidst a cross-country trip that brought me to a gray coastline full of crashing waves and big, jagged rock, they remind me of the skeletons sitting in One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship. Those old bones are draped in enough rich-stuff to make any intrepid Goonie’s eyes light up.
You know what comes next, right?
Music. Movies. MTV. Headlines.
Full immersion back into the 80s as I pry out those rattly bones from all the decomposing gunk and start laying them on the ground. I’m gonna let you watch me do this. Someday, I’ll let you see the treasures I found when I followed the map buried under the dust and debris at the bottom of my dad’s old boat.
The Section dedicated to this fiction project is here: THE WRECK ROOM. ©1990
Guaranteed I’ll also be putting a bunch of map-following, booty-trap triggering, gold-discovering adventures on Notes as I write it. Especially the mixtape gems. (C’mon. 80s, yo.)
© 2023 Hartebeast
While Bella & the Beast holds the stories of my metamorphoses, this other publication covers my 5 Elements dance teaching system and the creative process, art & innovation, healing & nature Life System that exploded into being with my move to the Ozarks. Both of these publications are still under construction as I migrate 6 years of content from multiple platforms.
But just like my dad and I are tinkering with the operations of the new-old boat and our Daddy-Daughter reconnection, I’ll find my rhythms here before you know it.
This is the impending home of where I’ll be migrating my fantasy fiction. Although everything I do contains similar threads, these serial novels are really different animals from my memoirs, and from the 80s historical romances I am prizing out of that yellow folder. (It blows me away that my youngest decades really are historical fiction now.)
Of course, if Substack’s Sections mechanism had dropdown menus, I would consider putting everything under one publication. But they don’t, and I have multiple fantasy worlds I’ve created, as well as my serial novels and novellas set in Olympos & the Underworld of Ancient Greece. Since my other publications already require multiple Sections and they often attract very different kinds of readers.…yeah. We just needed a separate Stack for this stuff. Also still under construction:
