Boating

Ever since I was a kid, I begged to take a little boat onto the stock tank here at the ranch. Timing is everything. The tank dries up without enough rainfall. One cannot go boating when the pond is dry. So I would only beg and whine about this the better part of each year. In summer it was an academic question.Ever since I was a kid, I begged to take a little boat onto the stock tank here at the ranch. Timing is everything. The tank dries up without enough rainfall. One cannot go boating when the pond is dry. So I would only beg and whine about this the better part of each year. In summer it was an academic question.

My childhood memories of the tank centered on skipping a few stones with my father.  When I had children of my own, I carried on this proud tradition, taught them the joys of rock skipping as well. One year we fired off bottle rockets over the water on the Fourth of July (or New Year’s. I can’t remember which).

I clearly remember conversations with my elders about the joys of the tank. They usually went like this;

“Can I walk down to the tank?”

“No, there are snakes near the water.”

“Can I make a raft and float it on the tank?”

“No, there are snakes near the water.”

“Can I climb that tree near the tank?”

“No, snakes can climb trees. Just ask Jamie and Sammie.”

And the always popular, “You stay away from that tank now!” I received similar responses concerning the river.

Jamie and Sammie lived on the ranch with their parents. I was jealous as hell that they were here all the time, while I was forced to return to town every Sunday evening. But even Jamie, the younger of the two, was a good bit older than I was. He’d pretty much outgrown the innocent childish joys of the great outdoors by the time I could have learned a good bit of mischief from him. Plus I expect he’d been forbidden to initiate me.  I do remember Jamie with a BB gun once, and if my parents, aunts, uncles and their cousins — not to mention his parents — had known he had a gun of any kind within five miles of me, they’d probably have had his hide. So I was pretty much on my own. As I grew older and brought friends with me on Sunday afternoons, we ALL heard the warnings of everything we shouldn’t do or touch.

Most of my childhood queries about doing things independently on my Sunday afternoon visits to the ranch went very much the same way each time. There was always the admonition tacked onto the end of everything, “Be careful.”  I hear those same words coming out of my mouth now when I speak to my kids. And they’re in their late twenties now. (I probably need professional help).  I was warned not to reach under rocks or logs — or stick my little hands into dark places. I was warned not to go into the barn. “There are snakes in the barn”. I wasn’t allowed to walk near the gravel pit, the “cliff,” or near the river. You guessed it. Snakes. Or maybe for variation, it might be, “You can fall off the edge of the cliff.”  I was warned about wasps and ants and every other imaginable danger. It was a wonder I matured normally at all. (I suppose there’s still some question about that, depending upon whom you ask).

Growing up way too overprotected is the price paid when a kid enters a childless household and an entire, childless, extended family. The effect is compounded when the family members welcoming the surprise newborn range in age from 42 (my mother, the baby of her family and four years my father’s junior) to well into their fifties (most of their siblings and cousins). My friends had grandparents of this generation. I was one of the only kids whose father had white hair (which he actually had since age thirty). But I didn’t know any better for a long time.  And later I realized I was quite lucky to have come into this world at all. So I shouldn’t have complained. But that’s another story.

I was slightly less sheltered in town,  even allowed to ride my bike a few blocks to school on my own, drive a car at 14 (damn dangerous if you ask me), things like that. (Didn’t they realize there were snakes in town too?) I must have managed to make it through all my required developmental stages with my psyche relatively intact. I was allowed to go to college in New Orleans, but no farther.  I found no snakes there — or in New York (where my poor  family must have been horrified I moved). I discovered a few snakes in Florida. None of them turned out to be deadly.

When I returned to Texas and chose to live at the ranch (always my very most favorite place in the whole, entire world — despite it being apparently fraught with danger, both seen and unseen), I was initially pretty much terrified of everything. Gee, I wonder why. Between Jamie, then Zack and our friend Ron, I learned what to really worry about — and how to hopefully avoid danger as much as possible while still enjoying myself immensely in the great outdoors. Much has to do with common sense and not being a totally stupid idiot moron. And experience is a great teacher (long as you don’t kill yourself while you’re in the “school of hard knocks”).

When my children were small, we took a little ski boat on a real lake nearby, so they didn’t ask to paddle anything out onto the tank a la Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. There were no small boats here then anyway. That would have been considered a luxury. After Zack bought a little fishing boat and some paddles, I envisioned a picnic basket and parasol, but that pipe dream evaporated into the morning mist that often rises from the tank itself. There was no time here for such frivolity (if fishing weren’t involved). There was fence to run, cows to tend, brush to burn! (You get the idea. Work, work, work).

It took Becca and Jared to finally realize my lifelong, romantic dream of boating on the tank (like models in a pointillist, Georges Seurat painting). When the kids had mused about going out on the water, Zack offered the little boat. (Becca had forgotten it, and Jared hadn’t noticed, unceremoniously stored as it was, in a far barn). Sometimes it takes a couple of kids with some time on their hands to make unexpected things happen. Sometimes it takes kids or guests to make Zack stop working for a few minutes. Within the hour, we were fulfilling my modest, little childhood fantasy. Next time I’ll pack a picnic basket —and take a parasol!

Gene Ellis, Ed.D is a Bosque County resident who returned to the family farm after years of living in New Orleans, New York, and Florida. She’s an artist who holds a doctoral degree from New York University and is writing a book about the minor catastrophes of life. Check out Genie’s blog at  http://rusticramblings.wordpress.com/