SLOGGING TO WINDWARD Duckworks Magazine（平,迎风Duckworks杂志）.pdfVIP

SLOGGING TO WINDWARD By Chuck Merrell – chuck@ December 2000 The Mystery of the Christmas Dinghy is solved! There are certain questions that that seem to pop up now and then that just scream out for an answer—questions like: Is Diet Coke a good substitute for orange juice at breakfast? Will Barbara Streisand ever get a nose job? Why does every garage sale seem to have a plywood pram dinghy of indeterminate origin in it, and more to the point what happened to the yacht the pram was supposed to tend? Did that get sold at the last garage sale or what? REWIND to Marin County California on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1970 something: Having not much better to do, I find myself following a series of small “Garage Sale!” signs down a private road near Stinson Beach. When I get to the end of the trail, I’m at a beautiful house with a “Dynamite (Marin County Real Estate Rat talk) view” of the ocean. And, sure enough, here’s the owner trying to get rid of some of his unwanted consumer items probably to make room for future unwanted consumer items. Long story short, I check out the table full of faux Tiffany lamps, old boom-boxes, pre- dawn of history K2 skis and finding nothing I can’t live without, am about to go when at the back of the garage under a pile of newspapers, I see a little blue boat. I ask him about it. And he says, “Oh that—that’s not much good. My dad built it back in Depression times for something to do because he didn’t have enough money to go to the movies, I guess. He probably got the wood for nothing and for some reason we’ve kept it, but it’s been in the way and I’ve been thinking about just dumping it. I don’t care much about boats, and neither does the wife. Besides, if you look, you’ll see that it leaks because the boards across the bottom don’t come together in a couple places. Typic