Tides: “It will be easy!”
The idea of building a raft came to us during my last year of college. My friend Justin, a suburban, spikey haired old friend, and I were helping another old friend, Rob, move into an apartment down in New Paltz. We took a break to walk along the Walkill River. Finding a clearing where we could see the river through a bunch of skinny trees and vines, we watched the waves move downstream toward the Hudson.
“Dude,” Justin said, “it would be so awesome to take a boat all the way down to the city.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but where are we going to get a boat?” We had this conversation every time we went fishing or swimming. A couple of poor guys like us couldn’t get our hands on a boat. Still, it was nice to picture ourselves on the open waters drinking a beer, enjoying the sunlight and the breeze, throwing a hook in the water and talking to a buddy next to you waiting for a bite.
“You know,” said Rob “you could canoe all the way to the city if you wanted.”
Everybody sighed. That wasn’t the same as having a boat, something you could sit on and relax with your friends. It seemed like a lot of work, canoeing.
“How hard do you think it would be to like, build a raft or something and float down?” I asked.
Justin laughed. Rob loves a spectacle.
“I think we could do it,” he said.
Justin laughed a little more.
“Why don’t we do it?” I asked, sort of egging on Rob but also feeling like we could do it easily if we really wanted to. Now Rob grew more cautious.
“Well, what are we going to do? What are we going to build it out of?”
Justin forced a chuckle the way a person might try to laugh at a joke they’ve already heard.
“Well, it would be easy. All you’d need is some wood and a bunch of like, you know, floaty stuff. And you could just float down the river when the tide goes out, and tie up when the tide comes back. Then when it goes out again, just untie and keep going. It would be easy,” I said.
“The tide changes twice a day,” said Rob, who was a boy scout. “It comes up for six hours and goes out for six hours. Comes up and goes out. And the time it changes changes everyday.”
Justin was silent.
“So what? You’d have to tie off twice a day. Easy.” I said.
“Well I suppose we could do it,” Rob said, “but why would we want to?”
“To go to New York City.”
“I’m down,” Justin chimed in.
“Umm,” said Rob, “Have you heard of a train or a car or any of the other means of transportation that exist that aren’t ridiculous?”
“Yes yes, but I want to go to New York on a raft,” I said.
“Count me in,” said Justin.
Rob smiled. “Well, what are we going to build it out of?”
“You know, stuff that floats.”
“So we’re just going to float down the river on a bunch of—pretty much other people’s garbage? And what are we going to say when people ask us what we’re doing?”
The idea came to me immediately.
“We’ll tell everyone we’re protesting America’s reliance on fossil fuels!” The three of us laughed.
“Well, okay,” said Rob with a big grin on his face. “But we’re going to need a big flag.”
* * *
We didn’t do much planning for our first raft. About two weeks before our launch we started gathering the supplies we guessed we’d need: some decaying pallets, some rotten fence posts, nails. We asked the Coeymans Yacht Club if they had any barrels they could donate to us, and they showed us to a pile of barrels in the middle of the woods half covered in leaves. When we picked them up a black organic ooze poured out. We brought everything to my friend’s parent’s driveway to put it together. Here are some pictures of the platform under construction.
“What do you know about building a raft?” My father asked when I told him about the project.
“What did the first person who ever invented a raft know about building a raft?” was my crafty response. I figured we’d solve the problems as they came up. It would be easy.
One of the bigger obstacles turned out to be transporting the platform to the river after we’d built it, because it was more than 12 ft by 12 ft and we didn’t have a trailer. We tried to lift the thing to put it on the back of a truck but it bent like melted cheese. It was very heavy and awkward. Finally a friend lent us a trailer and we snuck it in the middle of the night downhill to the river.
The next day Justin and I tied on the barrels, and Rob showed up and added lots of flags. He also showed up with a 30 pack of water.
“What are you doing with that?” Justin said. “I thought this was a beer only trip.”
“Dude we’re going to want water on this trip or we’ll get dehydrated.”
“There’s water in the beer!” I compromised.
Rob put up four posts and strung a tarp across for protection from the weather. We loaded up our supplies and I donned an outfit I felt was appropriate for the captain of a raft. Here we are getting ready for launch.
I asked my mother to break a bottle of champagne across the bow but the wood was soft so the bottle wouldn’t break. That’s an unlucky sign for a seagoing vessel. On the other hand we had a bottle of champagne to drink. An hour before high tide (our launch time) a torrential storm opened up overhead and everything got soaking wet. Nonetheless we left more or less on time to the cheers of our family and friends. It was not comfortable.
We made about nine miles in the first tide and slept near Rattlesnake Island in Coxsackie. After the storm passed that night the skies cleared to show a moonless black expanse dotted with millions of celestial sugar crystals. It was really peaceful out there in the middle of the night, in the process of doing what we said we were going to do, despite the claims of naysayers. And there were a lot of naysayers and people who thought we were joking about building a raft.
The next day we got up at seven a.m. and got in the water again, but we seemed to be sitting deeper in the water.
I took a nap around noon and woke up an hour later with my feet touching the water. The barrels we’d been given were not sound. We starting sinking just as a barge and a tanker were passing on either side of us. They passed like two skyscrapers only dozens of feet away and we were knocked down when their wakes collided underneath us. By that point we couldn’t steer at all because we were half submerged, and our only choice was to paddle for a pile of rocks with a beacon on top of it in the middle of the water near the cit of Hudson.
There we stayed, marooned, our raft sunk and in pieces, in the middle of the river with the Rip Van Winkle Bridge a mile downstream. For three hours we sat there trying to figure out what to do, until the tide started coming back in and washing away our stuff. Finally we called the police, who came out and laughed at our sorry state. They brought us to Hudson where we had to call Rob’s father to pick us up, an hour later, in the drizzle.
I got home in a bad mood. I expected to make it to New York. This was my first lesson that school was over and in the real world you don’t get to succeed just because you want something and make a show of it. It seemed like a mean trick of existence our plans were frustrated after hours of hard work. As far as I was concerned, we absolutely had to try again.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mom Trombley // Jun 1, 2009 at 10:50 am
Dallas,
Since I know you try again I can only say thank goodness your not a quitter. Remember, everyone has dreams, however, only a rare few have the courage to act on them. I am proud to say you are amongst the rare who choose to go for it. I am so proud of you.
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