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MOVING A FORTY-SIX-foot catamaran over a hundred miles to the water seemed to me as daunting a task as building it. But just like the construction phase of the project, Terry wasn’t worried about things like that.
“Moving it’s the easy part, Robbie. What I dread is dealing with all the bureaucrats we have to get permission from before we can launch. It doesn’t matter that we built it all with our own hands and our own money. Now we’ve got to pay the government for permission to keep it! That’s what’s wrong with this country, Robbie. They would tax every breath you take if they could figure out how to do it!
“Look at these houses right here on this street. The people that live in them think they own them, what a joke! You can’t own anything in this country, Robbie, especially not a house or piece of land. You rent it from the government for however much they decide to charge you every year in property taxes to let you use it. Get behind on your payment and they auction it off to the highest bidder. Don’t mow your grass and they send a crew to do it for you and hit you with a bill in the mail. Leave an old car parked in your driveway too long and they’ll tow it away. That’s why we’re moving aboard a boat, Robbie. Who wants to pay all that money to live on a piece of dirt and be told how to do it?
“But now they’re going to tax the crap out of us just to give us a registration number! That’s how the government operates, Robbie. They love numbers. Everything is a number to them, including you and me. Without both a hull identification number and a state registration number painted on the topsides, some game warden or water cop will write us up. Then you’ve got to pay the fine and still pay the taxes and registration. If you don’t pay, they send men with guns to take you to jail!
“They’ll want to know every penny we spent on the materials that went into the construction, and then they’ll make up a number for what they figure the whole thing’s worth and hand us a tax bill for that. What’s worse, if we don’t go now, they may not even let us leave.”
Terry was especially worried about the latter possibility. He said the government was getting bigger, turning into a monster that required even more taxes to keep it fed and that gave it more and more power to tell people what they could and couldn’t do. He said it was all under the guise of making us safe, but it was really about control. He said that up until now, we had it pretty good compared to some places, but that it wouldn’t be long before the rules and regulations would get as bad as some European countries already were.
“In France, they make all the decisions as to whether your boat is seaworthy or not, and then tell you how far you can sail it from shore, if at all. Wanna go farther? Then you gotta buy everything on their list of “safety” equipment and have your vessel inspected by the bureaucrats who make the decisions. Then there are the all the taxes and the insurance requirements on top of that. In the U.K., you can’t even sell a boat you built yourself until after you’ve owned it for five years. It’s coming over here too, Robbie. I’ll give it six months to a year before they sign bills like that into law. There are plenty of people who would love to see it happen; tax-hungry, rule-loving shore bastards like I said. They’re afraid of real freedom and don’t want anyone else to have it either. That’s why we’ve got to get down the river to Mobile and out to international waters ASAP! We’re going to be citizens of the world, Robbie, not just Americans. That’s what living on a boat is all about! Things aren’t the way you like them in one country, you set sail for a new horizon and try someplace else. The people who started this country did exactly that, it’s just that their descendants seem to have forgotten.”
Terry always had the same sense of urgency from the day he came into our lives. First it was to get the boat built. Now that it was built, it was to get it in the water. Then it was to escape the taxmen and lawmakers who he was sure were out to squash his dreams before he even set sail. I began to wonder if his urgency would end even after we made our escape, if we ever did. It seemed to me that Terry was always going to be worried about something, and he could rattle on for hours about all the reasons why life as we knew it couldn’t go on much longer.
“Anybody who thinks it can is insane, Robbie. The whole country is broke. All the jobs have been outsourced to China, and we’re fighting wars all over the world, especially where there’s oil. And even where there is oil, it won’t last forever. Not with every Banana Republic on the planet burning it up at the rate they are, driving cars and living in air-conditioned buildings just like the fat-assed Americans they want to emulate. It’s all going to collapse, Robbie, and the only ones left will be driven into the sea. That’s why we’re getting a head start. We’re going to beat them to the best places, and we’re going to have the right boat to do it, too.”
Terry raved on and on about the virtues of the catamaran he had finally chosen to build, claiming decades of careful research and hard-won experience guided him in his decision:
“There’s no better boat in the world we could pick to sail the troubled waters of the apocalypse, Robbie. A James Wharram catamaran is the ultimate in seaworthiness and simplicity, and she’ll take us places other boats her size couldn’t dream of going. They’ve been building these things all over the world for fifty years. They’ve been built in jungles, deserts, warehouses, backyards and even piece-by-piece in city apartments. They’ve been sailed from Culatra to Fatu Hiva. You’ll find them anchored everywhere from the Rio Dulce to the Great Barrier Reef. You can refit and rebuild them anywhere too. You don’t even need a boatyard to haul one of these cats out for a bottom job, Robbie. Hook up the sheet winch to a palm tree and drag her right up on the beach. Need a new mast? Cut a straight tree or glue one up with epoxy and two by fours and plane it round by hand. The beauty of these designs is that they don’t need hardware, just wood parts and rope lashings for the most part. You can get what you need anywhere!”
It was true that the whole thing was held together by rope. I didn’t know enough to know this wasn’t the norm in boat and ship building, so I didn’t say anything. I had seen enough rafts in cartoons and books to know they were lashed together, so it didn’t seem all that unusual at the time that the four main beams of our catamaran were literally tied to the hulls instead of bolted or joined with fiberglass and resin as one unit. Besides, the ropes looked strong and there were a lot of wraps of it at every connection. And when it was time to move the whole thing to the water, all we had to do was untie them and take it apart. Otherwise, transporting a twenty-four-foot-wide catamaran down the highway would have been practically impossible, according to Terry.
At first he considered having them moved one at a time by an eighteen-wheeler, but after calling several trucking companies for prices he ranted and cussed about how outrageous their quotes were and said we’d do it ourselves. Terry talked to Mr. L.C. again at the hardware store and armed himself with names and addresses. Then he took us on a drive in Mom’s car to visit several farmers in the nearby countryside. What Terry was looking for was a trailer he could rent, along with a truck to pull it, if possible. He soon found out that was not possible. Every farmer he talked to insisted on doing the driving, reluctant to let an ex-school teacher take off with his equipment to move some homemade contraption of a ship halfway across the state. He finally reached an agreement with an unemployed former trucker named Hal Jenkins, who had a well-worn twenty-year-old Ford F350 pickup and a forty-foot flatbed car hauler. When he came over to the barn to look at what Terry was asking him to move, Mr. Jenkins scratched his head and spat tobacco juice on the ground, then walked around the two massive hulls a couple times before committing to anything.
“I’ll do it for eight hundred dollars for the first hull, and six for the second one if the first one goes smooth enough. That’s as low as I can go ‘cause it takes a lot of diesel to pull something that big that far. But it’s up to you to figure out how we’re going to get ’em on the trailer and back off again at the other end,” he added. “I ain’t got no insurance neither, ’cept for liability. Can’t afford it. So if something happens getting them boats on or off the trailer or along the way, that’s on you and I ain’t responsible.”
Terry muttered something under his breath about fourteen hundred effin’ dollars, and then looked at Mr. Jenkins’ truck again before finally agreeing to the man’s price. He told me later, after Mr. Jenkins left that it was highway robbery, but not as bad as what the trucking companies were trying to take him for.
“How are we supposed to get the hulls all the way up on that trailer?” I asked. “Don’t we need one of those big crane machines like they use to build stuff to pick them up?”
“Nope. You’ve still got a lot to learn, Robbie. Getting a truck crane out here would cost even more than this opportunistic farmer is taking us for. We don’t need a crane; we just need a little mechanical advantage. You’ll see.”
That afternoon and the next morning we worked on building a sturdy lifting framework consisting of four vertical poles connected at the top by heavy beams and braced at the bottom on either side. We erected this framework over the starboard hull first; (Terry refused to let me call them left or right; saying I had to use the correct nautical terminology if I was ever going to be his navigator). The lifting frame was assembled with big galvanized bolts that we had to tighten with wrenches while standing on two tall stepladders that had belonged to my grandfather. Terry designed it so we could take it all back apart and load it on the truck for the move, as we would need it at the other end to get the hull back off the trailer. It seemed like a lot of trouble to me when a crane could have probably done it in a few minutes, but Terry wouldn’t hear of it. When the bolts were tight, he showed me how we would lift each hull, one at a time. He took several turns of heavy rope around the center of each top beam that spanned across the width of the structure, over the starboard hull, then used the rope to lash a big pulley-like device he called a chain hoist under each one, directly over the decks. Then he had me crawl under the hull at each lift point, passing a wide nylon strap under the keel so he could hook each end of it together at the top for connection to the hook on the chain hoist.
“It’s a force multiplier, Robbie. The mechanical advantage the chain hoists provide will allow us to manually lift the hull high enough so that Jenkins can back his trailer under it. Then we’ll let it down easy and strap it in place, and it’s good to go.”
It still seemed like an awful lot of work to me, but I had already resigned myself to a life of hard work now that Terry was in control. I would be his number one deck slave, with Janie and Mom a close second and third. Terry called Mr. Jenkins, and when he arrived with his long trailer, we lifted the hull as high as it would go using the chain hoists. Terry was furious to discover that he had miscalculated the height needed as Mr. Jenkins slowly inched the trailer backwards, lining it up with the forty-six-foot-long hull that hung precariously from our wooden lifting contraption. It seemed the beams were high enough, but he hadn’t taken into consideration that he would lose a couple of feet of vertical travel at the top because of the space needed for the hooks under the chain hoists and the bails at the top. There was no way to lift the hull high enough for the trailer to back under the keel without rebuilding the wooden lift frame at least two feet higher.
Mr. Jenkins told Terry that his mistake had cost him half a day, and that if he still wanted to get this hull loaded before tomorrow, he would stay and help rebuild the lift, but only if Terry paid him another two hundred dollars for his time. He said it was the same two hundred he had agreed to knock off for the second hull if things went smoothly, which they already didn’t.
Terry pitched a fit but forked over the two hundred, telling me later that Hal Jenkins had probably never made that much money in one day in his entire life. By the time we unbolted all the connecting beams and braces and lengthened the vertical posts by screwing stacked two-by-six boards to each side of each of the four posts, four hours had passed and it was two o’clock in the afternoon. We lifted the starboard hull again with the chain hoists, and Mr. Jenkins slowly backed his trailer beneath the hull, ignoring Terry’s frantic shouts and hand signals. The man knew what he was doing, and it was clear that he didn’t need any help, even though Terry didn’t want to admit it.
Our catamaran hulls were shaped like very deep “V”s on the bottom, which Terry said was a distinct characteristic of all James Wharram catamarans. This knife-like “V” would allow them to slice through the waves, and according to Terry, sail into the wind. That was all well and good when the boat was in the water, but Terry said the shape made the hulls a real pain in the butt to move around on land. I already knew he was right about that because I had to help him build the elaborate cradles that supported them and held them upright and secure as we were working on them. Without the crossbeams tying them together, the individual hulls would fall right over on their side if left to stand on their own. This was true on the ground, and now on Mr. Jenkins’ trailer. So once the trailer was under the first hull, we had to first strap down these building cradles that it had been supported in, securing them to the bed of the trailer so the hull could be lowered into them. This took another hour of farting around, trying to get them lined up and level and then figuring out how to keep them secure. When it was all done, Terry had probably used two hundred feet of half-inch nylon line in addition to the big nylon webbing straps he’d used to lift the hull. Mr. Jenkins pulled the trailer forward and drove the hull out from under our lifting frame, which we then spent another hour disassembling and securing, piece by piece to the trailer. By this time it was four in the afternoon and Mr. Jenkins said it was too late to leave because he didn’t want to be pulling a load like that at night on two-lane highways where deer jumped out at every turn. He insisted on waiting until tomorrow, and wanted even more money for his trouble.
Terry went ballistic at this and refused to negotiate, telling Mr. Jenkins we would unload the hull and find somebody else to move it before we paid another dime. Mr. Jenkins gave in, unhitching his trailer and blocking up the tongue so he could drive home in his truck, and then left, promising to be back at dawn in the morning.
“He said when he agreed to do it that it was up to us to get it on the trailer and back off again,” I said, defending Mr. Jenkins after he drove away and Terry continued cussing him up and down.
“That’s beside the point, Robbie. He quoted me a price for moving the boat with his truck and trailer. He wasn’t charging by the hour, he was charging us for a completed job. Just because it took us longer to get the boat on the trailer doesn’t give him an excuse to try and charge us what he would earn for driving his rig all day.”
“But it’s our fault he couldn’t drive today, wasn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter. Here’s the thing, Robbie. Without us needing this boat moved, he didn’t have a job. He’d be sitting out there on his porch in the country watching chickens peck and drinking beer. And when he’s done with this, that’s what he’ll be right back to. We presented an opportunity for him, and a good one too, but he turned it into an opportunity to try and screw us out of even more money. If we don’t get to the sea soon, Robbie, we won’t have a dime left to even buy groceries. Like I told you, the shore bastards are going to do everything in their power to keep us here just like them. Now go get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day!”
* * *
Mr. Jenkins arrived at daybreak just as he’d promised. It only took a few minutes to hook the trailer up to his truck, and we were off. Part of the deal Terry made with him was that the two of us would get to ride in the truck with him, so that when he got to the launch site way over on the east side of the state near a town called Iuka, we would be there to reassemble the wooden lift and offload the first hull. Terry didn’t want to buy the gas to follow him over in Mom’s car, so I was stuck in the unfortunate position of having to ride in the middle of the truck’s only seat, right between the two of them. It was going to be a long day: at least three hours over there, probably four to do all the work of getting the hull off and disassembling the lift again, and another three to get back.
Terry started his ranting as soon as we pulled out on the road. I don’t think Mr. Jenkins knew what he was talking about half the time, and he only replied to direct questions that Terry wouldn’t let him avoid.
“I don’t know nuthin’ about that,” Mr. Jenkins said. “I ain’t got no reason to go to them other countries. Hell, I don’t even like going across the line to Alabama or Tennessee.”
“You’re staying here at your own peril, Hal. This country’s finished. Why do you think we spent the last two years working every spare minute building this ship? We’re barely going to get out in time as it is. You might have a chance for a few years, living out in the sticks like you do, but sooner or later they’ll burn all these little towns like Calloway City too.”
“We’ll see about that! I don’t know who you figure’ll burn ’em. Any outsiders come around here tryin’ to start trouble, they’ll find out us country folks has got something for ’em they may not like.”
“That’s delusional thinking, Hal. I hear that kind of talk all the time. People think they can hole up in the woods with their guns and ammunition and fend off the savage hordes. You can’t see what’s really coming, can you Hal? I’m talking about a major meltdown. It won’t be the good guys against the zombies. Everybody you know will turn against you when they get hungry enough. I’m talking about a total collapse, Hal. It’s all coming apart at the seams and nobody can stop it or put it back together again.”
“So you figure you’re gonna get away from it on that contraption you built there? Whatcha gonna do when a hurricane comes? Don’t you know it’s hurricane season right now? Hell, Katrina tore up every boat on the Gulf Coast! They had eighty-foot shrimp boats sittin’ in the middle of Interstate 10! I know because I hauled debris outta there for six months under contract for FEMA. Ain’t no tellin’ how many people drowned. They still ain’t found all the bodies, and probably never will.”
“While it is still technically hurricane season, statistically the greatest threat of tropical cyclone activity in the Gulf of Mexico is from mid-July through September. That’s why we’ve waited until the middle of October to launch. The odds of a storm are slim, and we’ll reach the tropics before the first hint of winter frost. But hurricanes are the least of my concerns, Hal. A good sailor can avoid hurricanes—that’s easy. We won’t be caught in hurricane zones during the peak season. We’ll soon be south of the cyclone belt anyway, sticking close to the equator. There are plenty of safe places to wait out tropical cyclone season; you just have to know where they are. What it takes is research and experience.”
“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing. Me, I wouldn’t sail out of sight of land on anything smaller than a Destroyer, much less some homemade plywood boat. That Gulf ain’t nuthin’ to mess around with, I’ll tell you that! I got too many friends that’s worked out there on the rigs. You ought to hear the stories they tell about the weather they’ve seen out there.”
“The Gulf of Mexico isn’t even the ocean,” Terry countered. It’s like a pond compared to where we’re going. Yes sir, the blue Pacific is the place to be! Do you know there are still hundreds of uninhabited tropical islands out there, Hal? Islands so isolated that the nearest other land to them is a thousand miles away? Those islands are scattered across the Pacific like stars in the Milky Way. All we’ve got to do is decide which ones we want to see and set our course. The wind will take us there for nothing.”
This conversation went on for the entire trip across north Mississippi. Terry wouldn’t shut up about all the things he said we were going to do, while Mr. Jenkins remained convinced we were crazy to even think like that. Neither one of them gave the other credit for having any sense at all, and I didn’t dare get into the discussion, even though I was literally in the middle of it, stuck there for three hours on that dirty truck seat. I couldn’t wait to get out and get away from both of them, even if just for a few minutes to run to the men’s room when Mr. Jenkins stopped to fill up the truck with diesel.
Our destination for dropping off the first hull, and later assembling and launching the boat, was a place called Bay Springs Lake, near the tiny town of Iuka, not far from the Alabama state line. Terry said the lake was a man-made impoundment created when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. It was a big lake, with lots of fingers and coves and there were several boat ramps and campgrounds that Terry pointed out on the map as we got closer. He told Hal where to turn and we followed a hilly, winding road for miles through a forest of mixed pines and hardwoods until we finally came to the park entrance, where there was a gate and a ticket office with a ranger on duty. Terry muttered something about more highway robbery as Mr. Jenkins eased the truck and trailer forward, the huge starboard hull of our catamaran looming high over the ranger station roof.
Nobody else had a boat anywhere near the size of ours here, and I saw several fishermen with those expensive bass boats Terry always complained about stop and stare, their mouths agape and their heads shaking as they tried to figure out what our boat was. The ranger on duty was so baffled by what he saw that instead of collecting the entry fee through the drive-up window, he opened the door and stepped outside, taking in the length of the trailer and the monster hull before turning back to Mr. Jenkins.
“What is that thing?” he asked.
“It ain’t mine, that’s for damned sure,” Mr. Jenkins said. “This feller here just hired me to move it over here. Let him tell you about it.”
Terry was already out of the truck and had walked around back of the tailgate and stepped over the trailer tongue to greet the ranger. I was right behind him, anxious to find out what was going to happen next.
“I’m here to launch my boat,” Terry said, in a matter of fact tone.
“Boat! That thing looks more like a ship! How do you think you’re going to launch something like that in here? You’ll never float it off the trailer. It looks to me like the waterline is six feet above the ground, the way you got it loaded up there. Our boat ramps are designed for fishing boats. They’re not nearly deep enough or steep enough for something like that.”
“This is not the whole boat, this is just half of it,” Terry said. “It’s a catamaran, you see. This is the starboard hull. We have to unload it first near the water, then go back to Calloway City and bring the other one tomorrow. Then we’ll put the whole thing together with the crossbeams and decks that go between them, and it’ll be a simple matter to slide it down the ramp on skids and rollers.”
“Half of it? How big is it then? Why are you launching it here? A boat like that belongs in the Gulf.”
“It’s forty-six feet long and twenty-four feet wide. And yes sir, we are going to the Gulf. This lake connects to it; that was the whole point of the Corps of Engineers building the Tenn-Tom, wasn’t it? We want to launch here because I don’t want to have to transport it a single mile over land that’s not absolutely necessary, and this is the closest navigable water to Calloway City.”
“Well, I can’t let you take it off the trailer and just leave it. It’s against the regulations. There’s a parking lot at the boat ramp, but the spaces are for trucks with regular boat trailers. That thing’s longer than a truck and trailer combined.”
“We only need to leave it one night,” Terry argued. “We’ll be back tomorrow at the same time with the second hull. It won’t take long to put it together, then we’ll have it out of your parking lot and into the lake.”
The ranger kept saying no and Terry kept insisting that he call someone higher up to get the matter cleared up. He said he was a tax-paying citizen of this country and this lake was built with federal funds. He said he had the right to use it just as much as anyone else with a boat, and that they couldn’t discriminate just because his boat was bigger and required some assembly before launching. Mr. Jenkins just stood there watching the whole thing without saying a word, looking at whichever one of them was talking at the moment, and turning aside every few minutes to spit a stream of tobacco juice into the grass beyond the edge of the pavement. Finally, the ranger relented and went inside to use the phone.
“See what I mean about bureaucracy in this country, Robbie? They’ve got so many rules the underlings like him they hire to enforce them don’t even know what’s allowed and what isn’t. They’re like androids programmed to do a simple task. Throw a curve in there by asking something that’s not on their cheat sheet, and it nearly causes a melt-down when they try to figure out what to do!”
The hold-up at the gate ended up killing an hour. Finally a ranger with more authority drove down to the entrance station and looked over the boat and listened to Terry explain all over again what it was exactly that we were doing. After asking lots of questions and looking over the trailer and boat carefully, this older ranger finally agreed to let us unload the hull. He made us follow him in his truck down the road to the boat ramp parking lot, where he showed us where to set it off. Terry was furious at the delay, and after the ranger left, said we’d be lucky to get it off and get the lift broken down again before it got too dark to see. Mr. Jenkins was grumbling too, complaining about how he wasn’t going to get home in time for supper and then he’d have to get up at five o’clock again in the morning to move the other hull.
Finally, we were done just as the evening twilight faded. The starboard hull of our catamaran was sitting upright in the cradles, on the pavement off to one side of the boat ramp. With the bow pointed toward the edge of the lake, it looked like it was ready to slide into the glassy water that reflected the almost-full moon rising over the pines on the other side of the cove.
“Just one more to go, Robbie! Look how she shines in the moonlight! Before you know it, we’ll be anchored out on nights like this every night, away from all these melon farmers and their idiotic rules. Home from now on is going to be wherever the boat is!”