𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙁𝙪𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙉𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙉𝙚𝙜𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚

Sometimes, I would get close, too close, to her, and my heart would pound at the danger of the moment; one false move and…

No, I’m not referring to my early dating tragedies; I’m speaking of one of my near-death experiences driving my little 12’ aluminum runabout with a 15-horse engine next to a laker ship, some 700’ long and 100,000 tons, moving at 15 mph.

That’s the craziness boys like me in the 70s did in Ogdensburg when trying to find fun (which meant cheating death like a card shark in a high-stakes poker game).

I would get within about 20’ of the side of it, cross out in front of it, watching as that adobe and white colored behemoth, unstoppable as taxes in April, bore down on me, then going around back to the propellers, so close, the prop wash would make my little boat fishtail like it was a snake. Had my motor quit at any of those times…yet another time the body wouldn’t have been found.

Once, I got too close to shore, and going at full speed (what else), the bottom of my motor hit a small boulder, and my motor jumped right off the transom, out of my steering hand, and into the depths, snapping the rubber fuel line, as I cruised to a swift halt. The safety chains I had attached to the motor and the transom had been really rusty, so they just gave way. Luckily, I was close to the camp and paddled back. Ma later hired the Ogdensburg Rescue Squad to get the motor (for a donation), and we took it up to Ron Wright’s place in Morristown to get it fixed.

Uncle Paul’s camp, the base of my nautical naughties, was probably the best part of my summer - other than the first day of summer vacation when you felt like a paroled prisoner from school.

The camp was located across from Mater Dei College on the Fell Farm Road, an access road that, yes, cut through what once was the Fell Farm on Route 37 down to the river. The dirt and gravel road was only about 10 feet wide, with a couple of pull-off spots for people to let someone else through going the other way. Nuns would often be seen in their traditional black-and-white habits walking down to their camp, which was just a few down from Uncle Paul. Mom used to call them “penguins,” which I found, even as a kid, irreverent and a bit sassy. They would always wave as we drove by, and I saw them a few times going for a swim off their dock in once-piece suits and wearing rubber hair caps with plastic flowers on them, trying their best to look like Esther Williams.

The road would T at the end, and his camp was right there on the left. This land was actually part of the rail line that ran through here many years before, and once it left, my grandfather bought land in the 1940s, and so did three of his five kids, just across the camp road. My father didn’t want to buy land because he thought inter-family fighting might happen. My aunts and uncles put up small trailers, some with add-on construction, and that was fine enough for them since most of the time, they’d travel back to their house in the ‘burg to sleep, though many times would stay if it was an especially warm evening, and the river would be a cooler place to be.

Uncle Paul’s camp was a traditional wood structure; it had two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a larger dining/living room with many windows overlooking the river, which was only about 20 feet away.

It was a fantastic view, and even had a small deck where you could sit to watch the ocean-going ships quietly pass by. A few minutes later, their wakes would follow —sometimes pretty tepid, other times somewhat violent. This meant the ship was going faster than it should, and tethered boats would strain against their ropes as they rolled and rose.

I enjoyed many meals up there. If enough of the clan was up, we’d move our collective picnic tables together, end to end, and pass around all the traditional summer foods—corn on the cob, hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad, potato salad, and BBQ-grilled chicken. The gas outdoor grill certainly was put to good use. Potato chips and pop (or soda, depending on who you talked to) were abundant, as was beer for the men. Ma liked her vodka tonics.

My cousins and I were always finding things to do, typically on the water, but also going for walks up and down the camp road or playing board games like Trouble or Yahtzee. Walking the camp road, which was rough gravel, was essentially the early 70s version of walking on a bed of Legos, and you’d find the poor kid who didn’t have his sneakers on carefully traversing from one side of the road to the other as if an infantryman trying to avoid land mines.

The summer sun, often intense, would brown our skin and, more than once, burn it, making sleeping difficult. Revealing you had a tan to the guys I hung around with was a grave error because, sure enough, one of them would slap you on the burn just to say hi, ostensibly, but I knew better, as they were easily confused with the Devil’s spawn.

My cousins and I were divided into two classes: the older teens and the younger teens. If you were the younger ones, you wanted to hang out with the older ones, and if you were the older ones, you didn’t want the younger ones around, lest they rat you out for doing something you shouldn’t have done..

I can still see my brother, Mike, running full speed down the wooden dock, some 40 feet long, the boards straining under each footfall, and cannonballing into the water - then popping up and mock screaming as he was shocked by the cold, but at least he was “duck” as we used to say, meaning, he’d been completely under water. You could be up to your neck in the water, but if you hadn’t gone underwater completely, you weren’t “duck” yet. It was a weird word to use, but in our teen parlance of the time, you didn’t know where it came from, but you did know what it meant.

Pleasure boats went up and down, sometimes with water skiers, and sometimes just slowly meandering by with people taking in the views of the shoreline. Occasionally, the Cigarette boats would go by, elongated, luxurious high-speed boats with an unmissable droning sound, deep and rumbling, as their multiple high horsepower motors pushed them swiftly along, creating rooster tail sprays in the rear.

I learned, thanks to my Uncle Bob, how to waterski. After something like 389 attempts to get upright, I made it, and he took me around a bit, me falling but getting back up. Eventually, I got so good we’d go all the way down to the bay behind the Windjammer Lodge on one ski, making tight turns and throwing up huge waves as I did. Afterward, it felt like the knuckles in my hand were about to be pulled out, but what a blast I had. Of course, my brother Mike, being a latter-day Marquis de Sade, would be driving the boat and, at nearly full speed, would make a tight turn, and as I came around the turn, was flying at even higher speed, like the lash of a bullwhip.  If I was headed out towards the river and let go, Candian Customs might have come after me, so far I would go. If I let go heading towards shore, I might end up on the beach, so I hung on - just barely. If I fell forward while skiing, oftentimes my pants would be ripped off or down to my ankles, and there you are, bare butt in the water. God help you if you fell down on your butt because your waistband would go up to your chin practically, giving you the ultimate wedgie and the appearance of a wet Bazooka Joe.

Those hot, exciting, and busy summers are still in a backroom in my mind, and every once in a while, I’ll go to a similar place, and out they come on their own, and I have fun reliving them once again.

And I’m safe on land and not playing chicken with a laker ship!