The Naysayer

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Tue, 17 May 2011 04:41:47 -0400

First sighting from a concerned father.

Dropping the concrete anchor.

The night of the sixth day was the eve of our proposed launch date. As we finished framing the...

Tue, 17 May 2011 04:03:00 -0400

The night of the sixth day was the eve of our proposed launch date. As we finished framing the cabin and night fell, so did the rain. Nico and I opened up the roll-up door to my dad’s shop and backed our vessel inside to finish work, and as it turned out, a delayed day of intermittent rain was just what we needed to make some final adjustments.

After a delicious homemade and home-grown organic and gluten free dinner at Boone’s house with friends (pompous I know, but I swear that’s what it was), we convinced our gracious hosts to drive up the road and check out the progress. I pulled the giant door to the shop up once more and left the lights off. In their place, I lit one of my mom’s old kerosene lamps we were to bring with us and hung it on a nail I had pounded into the ceiling of the cabin. As our guests fumbled through the darkness of the shop, Nico and I helped them up the ladder onto the deck and we all sat on the bunks in the cabin marveling at the orange glow that danced off of the wood, sipping beer and laughing. It seemed to me as though we could be anywhere in time at that moment. Everything but our clothes was the same as any ship’s cabin must have looked up until the turn of the last century, and I just knew that we were communing with some ancient creative drive that has been with man since he first put his hands to tools. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my friends look more beautiful. I laughed and shook my head in disbelief as we sat and drank and talked about nothing in particular.

It’s been almost a year now since we began this odyssey, so my memory is a little fuzzy on what, in fact, took place on the seventh day. Like I said, it was raining, and I know we were inside tying up a few loose ends but I can’t really remember the particulars. I think we installed the mast which was an old pipe used to string a length of telephone wire from a power pole, and probably installed the fire pit - simply a rectangular frame of 2x4’s at the very front edge of the bow that was nailed in place and filled with gravel to support an old barbecue that we would burn our wood in.

While The seventh day may be a bit unclear, it all snaps back into focus on the eighth. The sun was out, and hot, and the wind was blowing gently. We were set on launching for our three day tour, from the mouth of the Flathead River, across Flathead Lake, and as far south as we could get.

Flathead Lake is the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, and I have eagerly divulged a much more detailed version of this information to any poor soul that has ever had the misfortune of asking me where I’m from. Coincidentally, it was also claimed to be one of the cleanest bodies of water in the world by the Flathead Lake Biological Station (http://www.umt.edu/flbs/AboutFLBS/FlatheadLake.aspx). According to local legend, it houses one of the worlds oldest and perhaps largest ancient creatures, the Flathead Lake Monster. Some say it’s a forgotten relic of the Mesozoic Era, while others believe it’s just a large Sturgeon. Either way, many wakeboarding sessions have culminated in wiping out on that great body of water, over 350 feet deep in the middle, and bobbing around in a life preserver wondering how many minutes it would be before my leg was grabbed by something huge and unseen as I anxiously waited for the boat to circle around and pluck me from the abyss…

But I digress. The point is, everything about this lake is huge. The waves are huge, the monsters are huge, and even on the fairest of days, the distance is admirable. This is why we wanted to see how far we could go. Many ships that were actually built to withstand the physics of maritime weather have sunk on this lake, and I sometimes wonder what that boneyard would look like if the lake were drained. But the eighth day was not going to claim the Naysayer. We had already decided it so. We loaded her up with fishing gear, coolers of meat, firewood, and of course, precious Canadian beer. On ice.

Nico and I had initially intended to float the length of the Flathead river, yearning for a true Huck Finn experience, but after a little scouting and talking to a few locals who had tried it in canoes and failed, we opted to put in at deeper waters. We loaded up in Boone’s truck and headed down to the boat launch with many honks and thumbs up on the highway. At one point I screamed at Boone to slow to a crawl, sure that we were about to take out a power line with our mast. I think we were just shy by about four feet.

It was late in the afternoon when we were finally in the water, and the sun was setting by the time we pushed off. We promised some friends that we would head for the local dockside bar to try and catch some cocktails and wild praise before 2am, and we waived our farewells. As the sun went down, and Nico began rowing, everything in the landscape lit up with this brilliant yellow color that is trademark to the end of summer in Montana. The water was as still as glass and we dropped a silent battery powered trolling motor we had brought into the hatch so we could prepare dinner over an open fire as we made our way towards the mouth of the river.

Yellow turned to orange, then to red and finally a deep purple glow and I think I stopped breathing for a little while. The picture was just too perfect - almost manufactured- and I felt dizzy, swelling with pride and love for my friends and for life and the unfathomable truth of the beauty that it sometimes shows us. It just didn’t seem real. But all of this was trumped when the fattest, goldenrod full moon I’d ever seen began to rise from behind the Mission Mountains. I tell you now, we did not plan this, and if it hadn’t been for the delayed day of rain we would surely have seen a large moon, but not a full one. This was the night. Somewhere far away the tides were being pulled hard, and we felt that gravity there on our little raft bobbing in our own ocean. We were the only vessel in sight as far as we could see, and as the mouth of the river gave way to the threshold of the lake, the stars came out and that big yellow moon made it look like we had some kind of weird light turned on, casting blue shadows everywhere around us. It was all too much. I doubled over with laughter and tears on the deck. We all did. It was like we were having a collective nervous fit and we couldn’t breathe from the pangs of hyperventilation that crippled our sides. It was one of the purest moments of my life, and I tried to hold on to it as long as I could, knowing that this was one of those rare moments that would later become a memory that could never be reproduced. The only thing that dwarfed it was the birth of my beautiful boy.

When the laughter finally subsided, and the tears dried, we dropped our wooden keel and raised our plastic tarp of a sail and glided silently through the moonlight twinkling off the water. The wind was blowing steady and after several tries of tacking against it to head to the proposed dockside bar in the distance, it was apparent that it just was not meant to be. We did not feel slighted in the least.

I broke the sound of the waves with a tinny speaker from my phone and played The Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” while Boone poured whiskey and ice into coffee mugs and Nico tended the fire. We tied down the keel, set our course, and raised our mugs in effigy to our friends: that twinkling light far across the water where they were amassed, drinking and laughing themselves, perhaps wondering if that small bobbing light in the distance was the kerosene lamp of some unearthly three-headed vessel they had thought to arrive. We turned our attention to the fire and the moon, and wore huge smiles as that light eventually disappeared behind the horizon; the stars left in its place.

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Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:26:05 -0500

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Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:59:37 -0500

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Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:54:00 -0500

Captain Nico.

Captain Thor.

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Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:51:00 -0400

Despite our let-down with the never-present...

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:59:00 -0400

Despite our let-down with the never-present “locals” on the island, we were all hopped up on Canadian beer and fresh air by the time we got back to the boat launch. I backed the trailer down into the water, and with one hand, Nico gracefully guided the raft in place above the 2x4 rails and gave me the “thumbs up”. We were out of the water in thirty seconds. Pats on the back and huge smiles went all around as the sun set behind the Rockies on a perfect Montana summer evening, and we strapped the raft down and headed back to the shop, already itching to start the framing of the cabin. The sky turned a dark purple color and the peaks of the Mission Mountains lit up like signal flares as we lumbered north on Highway 93.

The next morning, my entire body felt as if it had been beaten with a hammer in my sleep. Muscles I didn’t even knew I had were suddenly tensed up and burning, and my hands could barely clasp themselves shut. The constant hammering, lifting, drilling, and the recent rowing had taken their toll. I called Nico and said it would be a while before I could get to the shop. He said he felt the same way.

When I finally did arrive, it was already 3:30 in the afternoon, and it looked like rain was headed our way. We began framing the cabin towards the stern of the deck - two feet from the rear edge, and centered with a 1’ walkabout on either side. Roughly 6’ wide, 7’ long, and 6’ tall. We wanted the roof of the cabin to be as sturdy as possible, because we intended to use it as a lookout deck as well as a platform for hoisting the sail we would later fabricate. I made two benches for our bunks, and using a handsaw of all things, I roughly “routed” out the corners to make room for the mast that would eventually divide the front entrance in two. Nico had a bunch of siding from a shed he tore apart, as well as a couple of 100+ year old windows from the local opera house, which we were eager to utilize.

The funniest part about putting those windows in was the ease in which we decided upon the best height to frame them at. I sat down on my bunk and propped my elbow at what I thought would be the perfect height for hanging my arm out of the side with a beer, and asked Nico if he thought it seemed right. He agreed and an hour later, those babies were in.

Once the siding was screwed in to the exterior, and the roof was clad with 3/4” plywood, the cabin was rigid as stone. The walls were framed by overlapping chunks of 2x4’s together, and placing them 16” apart, and the roof was framed with 2x6’s laid on their flat sides, also 16” apart (off center). We screwed through the floorplate of the walls with a couple of massive lag screws we purchased especially for the job, making sure to hit the joists below the deck.

By the end of the fifth day, the cabin was framed, and on the sixth day we moved it indoors to avoid the rain while we clad and framed the windows. I found an old mix tape I made in high school and we listened to it on repeat. It was an eclectic mix of “The Crash Test Dummies”, “Nirvana”, “Aerosmith”, and “Butthole Surfers”, with a clip from an episode of “This American Life” on side two. It felt great to be back in the 90’s for a couple of hours.

That night, we were invited over to our friend Boone’s place for dinner. Boone is someone I had gone to high school with, and although we knew all of the same people, and went to all of the same parties, we never really spent much time together. It’s safe to say he was a closer friend to Nico. Nonetheless, Boone was always a guy who peaked my interest as someone you’d want to have on your side - a real tough grizzly of a man with a vice for a handshake and a whole-hearted gruff voice that shook his whole body when he laughed. Throughout our building experience thus far, Boone had stopped in every night to check on the progress and give us cold beer. I could see something stirring inside of him with each visit, and it was only a matter of time before he put his grizzly hands on his hips and declared, “Shit boys, I gotta get in on this!”

We welcomed his presence and enjoyed his company thoroughly.

I wish I had taken a picture of the scene I am about to...

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:21:00 -0400

Loaded with one hand in 30 seconds!

Slack from steel banding after wedging.

Framing the cabin.

Roof and bench framing.

Looks like rain...

I wish I had taken a picture of the scene I am about to describe. We had ten people aboard the raft, and two small oars with no oarlocks to hold them in place, which meant that we had to take turns putting ALL of our body weight into cutting through the water with those things. Ten people at an average of let’s say 150 lbs. each = 1500 lbs., + 1500 lbs. estimated weight of raft thus far = heavy. So there we were, slowly cutting our way through the water, headed for a small island about a mile out that had a house and a diving board jutting off of a granite steep, and all we could think about for motivation was jumping off that diving board into the cool green water. Someone brought along a battery powered radio and we must’ve looked like some delinquent alcoholic version of Washington crossing the Delaware as we blasted Guns N Roses through crackling tinny speakers, yelling “Heave!” in unison as a trail of cigarette smoke wafted lazily behind us - evidence of invisible smokestacks for the tourists laughing and taking pictures from the shore.

Growing up on Flathead Lake, I had been to the aforementioned island many times over many years, and even as a young boy I can clearly recall doing cannonballs off of that diving board. In all those visits to the island I have never seen people in the house that sits upon it. Suffice to say, we were puzzled when a middle aged party moored a few yards away from the island and sat silently drinking beer and watching us with strange concern. We waved and laughed and hooted and hollered and they said nothing. Just sat with wry smiles watching us.

As we drew near, the boat started it’s motor, slowly drove into the dock on the island, and the crew began to tie off. Still, we thought they were fellow visitors to the island, anchoring to explore as so many others have over the years. It wasn’t until we were just a few feet away from them, exhausted after our rowing efforts but elated to finally arrive at our destination, that they made their presence verbal. In a high nasal whine, one of the women sang a taunting song: “Keep Goooing!” The emphasis was on the “go” in the word, and her tone went up and then back down on the “ing”. She was smirking as she said it. What had been a mystery before was suddenly crystal clear: These were the unknown owners of the island, finally come to reclaim their territory, and they had known all along that we desired nothing more than to jump off of that diving board, so they waited until it was just out of reach to deny us of our want. They got a real kick out of our disappointment.

The dawn of the fourth day found us with much to do, albeit a...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:55:00 -0400

The dawn of the fourth day found us with much to do, albeit a seemingly simple order of monotonous operations. We had to lay the joists perpendicular to the 2x8 spans that ran parallel to the barrels, and we had to secure them to the spans in a rigid manner that would ensure no buckling, should the deck somehow come torn loose. Any structure is only as strong as it’s foundation. This task was accomplished by laying out eight foot lengths of 2x4’s across the spans, every sixteen inches apart along the length of the frame, and then cutting sixteen lengths of 9” long 4x4’ blocks. The 4x4 blocks were rationed eight to the bow and eight to the stern, through bolted first to the spans, and then to the 2x4 floor joists, in all four corners of the first two barrel cells on each side and each end of the raft. Got it? Why I didn’t take a picture to illustrate this method is beyond my reasoning, and truly, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The remaining floor joists were secured to the frame in the same manner, but we used 9” lengths of 2x4’s instead of 4x4’s, and screws instead of through-bolts, figuring that any torque not already held fast by the sixteen through bolted sections would square true once the 3/4” plywood decking was fastened to the floor joists (which was also done using an array of different sized and different headed screws we found in a bucket).

We left an opening in the deck near the stern where we would later build and drop the keel. We also figured that if we had to resort to using an outboard motor, the opening would be hidden by the cabin that was to be erected around it, and we could evade the obvious appearance of the dreaded “Motor Vehicle” from anyone who wanted to label the craft as such.

Late in the afternoon we had the decking installed and we wrapped the barrels with steel banding we found in the barge builder’s field and nylon strapping material that my dad gave us. I never doubted that the barrels wouldn’t “wedge” successfully into their chambers, but I wanted to ensure they wouldn’t float away while we launched and loaded the raft from the trailer. The only thing I wasn’t sure of at this point was whether or not the weight of the raft would be slight enough to lift off of the trailer once we had it in the water. It all depended on the angle of the boat launch ramp we used and the buoyancy of the barrels. We were so excited to test the raft out that we opted to simply drive it down into the water and see whether or not it lifted easily. If it did, we knew we would float, and if it didn’t, we would simply head back to the shop and try to locate a wench or a come-along.

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable and unexpected results of building this raft was the organic nature in which my dad’s shop became the unofficial “clubhouse” for curious friends and passersby. Every day people would drop by to watch the progress, lend a hand for an hour or two, or share a couple of much needed cold beers. Such were the conditions towards the end of the fourth day of construction, and we found ourselves basked in the company of a few enthusiastic friends, anxious as we were to see how our vessel would take to water. We all agreed that we ought to head down to the lake immediately for a swim with the raft. By the time we got to the boat launch, nearly a dozen of our friends were there, and we had a regular crowd of sympathizers to cheer us on as I backed the trailer into the water.

As soon as the front of the trailer was submerged, the raft lifted gracefully off of it’s rails. Men with more classically manufactured boats stared in awe as they struggled with wenches and frustrated hand motions trying to get their boats in or out of the water. We were launched in thirty seconds flat. The Naysayer was seaworthy.

By the end of the third day of construction, we had all of...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 06:29:00 -0400

Spotted barge. We are not alone...

Spacing the barrels and measuring wood.

Our first reluctant purchase.

Barrel chamber frame in place.

By the end of the third day of construction, we had all of the barrels set in place on the 2x4 rails, framed into individual chambers held together by long spans of 2x8’s and lag bolts. My idea was to space the 2x8’s far enough apart so that the height of the boards would clear the apex of the circumference of the barrel (so as to leave room for decking joists above the boxed individual barrel chambers), but not so wide as to let the barrel push through their respective chambers once buoyant. I figured that the weight of the deck and the cabin would be substantial enough to push down on the barrels, and the buoyancy of the barrels would be substantial enough to push up into their slightly “too narrow” chambers, effectively wedging the barrels in place before they had a chance to touch the decking joists from underneath.

The weight of the raft was figured by using simple math and common sense: the amount of weight required to submerge a volume of air is equal to the weight of the volume of material that the air is displacing. In other words, if a gallon of water weighs 8.35 pounds, and a barrel holds 55 gallons of volume, 55 x 8.35 = 459.25 pounds of weight needed to submerge 55 gallons of air in water. Of course, there is the weight of the barrel itself, but I figured that was negligible enough not to worry about. Since I never wanted any barrel to be submerged more than half-way underwater, I simply divided the submersible weight by two for each barrel, and multiplied that by twelve because we were using twelve barrels to float the raft. 459.25 pounds per barrel / 2 = 229.62 (x12) = 2755.5 pounds max weight limit.

The 2x8’s were lap-jointed together at least six feet on either end, roughly along the middle of the raft, or wherever the boards that matched the closest in length ended. We tacked everything in place with nails first just to hold our distances, and then drilled a half-inch hole through the laps and put our found lag bolts through them. We had to break down and buy a few nuts for these, along with some screws and caps we needed for the barrels.

Once the 2x8 spans were positioned on either side of both rows of barrels, 2x8 studs were framed in to keep the barrels from moving forward or backwards, and finally, the ends of the spans were tied together along the bow and stern of the frame, holding it all together square and level.

On the second day, Nico and I spent most of our time...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:45:00 -0400

The 20' trailer bare.

Installing the 2x4 rails for the barrels

1\2" clearance from bed to barrel.

Rails installed.

Barrels collected.

Mysterious "Component B".

On the second day, Nico and I spent most of our time searching for barrels. We didn’t care if they were steel or plastic, so long as they were fifty-five gallons in volume and airtight. You never really know just how many empty barrels there are in the world until you start looking for them. We drove around town for a couple of hours, following leads from friends and looking down alleys and on the banks of highways until we found them. All of our inquiries about the barrels were met with ambivalent shrugs and most people were happy just to have someone remove them from their properties.

By far the most lucrative and questionable score came from a local company that covers cars in giant plastic advertisements and patterns - like when a city bus gets all gussied up for a new Pixar cartoon. To accomplish this, they use a two-part formula of mystery chemicals from an ominous sounding company, “Line-X” and the barrels, although shining brilliantly in their new paint and perfect steel shells, were mysteriously labeled simply “Component A” and “Component B”. The Component B barrels had open top lids so we opted not to use them, but the Component A barrels needed only to be capped tightly with a 3 inch plug that was already loosely fitted in place. For the rest of the construction phase we would sometimes double over laughing as the imagined effects on the ecosystem of “Component A” became one of our dark inside jokes (the barrels were sealed with airtight threading compound and tested for air-seal prior to use. No barrel was opened into the water at any time during our voyage).

By the end of the second day we had collected a dozen barrels (our desired quantity) and by the beginning of the third we began laying out the barrels on the flatbed trailer. The trailer was twenty feet long by eight feet wide, and clad in rotten plywood, some of which needed to be replaced before we began. We had a generous pile of scrap lumber from my dad’s construction company, and a fair amount of it was one to two foot long sections of 2x4’s that were too short to use for the main components of the rafts. These were laid out end to end on the trailer as rails for the barrels to sit in place while we built and later transferred the raft. They were placed far enough apart to keep a barrel from rolling, but close enough together to keep the lowest point of the barrel from touching the trailer floor. I wanted as little surface area as possible touching the wood to the barrels so if we had to push the raft on or off of the trailer, we would get as little resistance as possible.

By the end of the first day, we decided to celebrate our good...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:34:00 -0400

"Old Steel Bridge"

By the end of the first day, we decided to celebrate our good fortune junking by jumping off of the “New Steel Bridge” over the Flathead River. Growing up, the bridge was notoriously known as the “Old Steel Bridge”, aptly named for it’s composition of thin and sparsely positioned I-beams, installed from a time when cars were fewer in the valley. It was a few hundred yard long one-lane bridge, with wooden planks for the cars to drive over and overhead trusses that towered some fifty feet above the water. Wrecked cars and dumped steel littered the shallows below, and despite this, or perhaps in defiance of it, the braver local high school kids would jump off of the highest point of the bridge, wobbling from side to side every time a truck would lumber across below.

The old truss frame now rests along the shore of the newly constructed bridge, and while kids still climb it for a thrill, jumping off of it these days would probably be no more dangerous than the risk of impalement we endured as kids when it resided over the water. I opted for exploring the underside of the structure and taking pictures while Nico, ever the daredevil, performed back-flips gracefully, twenty-five feet in the air.

My father is a man best described as a celestial body;...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 02:34:00 -0400

My father is a man best described as a celestial body; perhaps more accurately as a star or supernova. Pure energy manifested in physical form. Not only does he live up to the physical potential that all inert gases do once ignited, but I like the celestial metaphor because to me, he is a supernatural presence in the ether. He wholly embodies the ethos of the transcendental: directly referred to, but beyond direct comprehension; both a part of, and independent of the universe and time. I have witnessed his affect on those he holds dear from a very early age, and even as a little boy, I was always able to understand that his friends regarded him as a soothsayer of sorts: not in any overtly mystical or performative sense (he displays a conservative favor both in his appearance and his politics), but more in an unspoken and equally undefinable manner. When he speaks, he speaks with his whole body, wildly throwing his arms in the air and leaning slightly forward, and his eyes shimmer when he speaks of something he finds particularly interesting or hilarious. He is a natural storyteller, and loves nothing more than a well delivered punchline. He is the elected chief among his tribe, no doubt, as his friends and family trust his perceptions of fairness, equal distribution of responsibility and leisure, his ability to keep peace and settle disputes, and his genuine relish for life and the universe in general. Not one person in our hometown his age doesn’t know him directly or otherwise, and I have never heard an ill word spoken of his name by any of the locals.

Needless to say, even Atlas surely must feel fatigued from holding the weight of the world upon his shoulders. It is sometimes difficult working within eyesight of a man who has an answer for everything. So I must lovingly refer to him as the original Naysayer when I began this odyssey. At every turn, every detail, he would patiently listen with pursed lips as I delivered my descriptions of how I envisioned this thing, and then immediately give me a laundry list of alternatives to my theories as soon as I took a breath. As his son, I of course was obliged to immediately disagree and further state my opinions of how the raft was to be built, and we would go back and forth like this until he would put his hands on his hips, and shake his head with a smile, exhausted from arguing, and say with a laugh, “Okay, but take a flashlight with you so I can find the light underwater when I come to rescue you guys at night.”

Nonetheless, he was intrigued with my plan to build a raft from found objects, and generously donated his workshop, his tools, his 20’ flatbed trailer piled high with scrap lumber, and of course, his opinion. Among his endless bounty of local resources, he sent me over to the farm of someone he knew: a retired barge builder. There, Nico and I found a trove of valuable treasures: rusted but airtight fifty-five gallon drums, massive beams of treated timber, steel piping and machinery parts, and perhaps most valuable of all, a rotted steel oil barrel stocked to the brim with six-inch lag bolts. We collected everything we could without taking any more than we thought we might need, and found the rest of the barrels simply by driving around town and knocking on doors whenever we spotted one sitting in a yard or alley.

By the end of the first day we already had half of our supplies. Thanks, dad.

These were the original “sketches” I made. ...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:52:00 -0400

These were the original “sketches” I made. Nico’s eyes dilated and he began to drool when he first saw them, but for those of us familiar with CAD software, it’s no secret that these are very basic and easy drawings to make. Initially, I wanted to space the barrels so that just under sixteen feet of them lined up end-to-end would be in the water. This was mainly because if we were to license the raft, the price difference is significantly lower for “personal water craft” under sixteen feet in length versus those that are over sixteen feet. I hypothesized that if less than sixteen feet of mass was actually in the water, then more length could hang off of the deck, above the water, and thus be argued as an extension of the deck, rather than as a part of the submerged, taxable area, should we be confronted by any lawmen. I then began to question the definition of “personal water craft” as stated by the Montana Department of Motor Vehicles, and wondered if the raft even qualified as a “motor vehicle”. Technically, we had no motor, so why should we register it with such an institution? I imagined that legally, we could not be disputed if we stated that our floating dock had somehow become cut loose from safe harbor, and we poor souls had been drifting aimlessly for days, overtly thankful when the bow of the Montana Fish and Game cruiser came into our view of the horizon.

I then realized I was thinking way too much about such a trivial scenario and opened another beer. Besides, it went against the very nature of the idea of the project, which was to build as much raft for as little money as possible. Damn the Man.

From left to right: Thor Erickson, Boone Skidsroo, Nico...

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:07:00 -0400

From left to right: Thor Erickson, Boone Skidsroo, Nico Heidert

I can’t remember exactly when or how it happened, and even after it was decided upon, the bridge between concept and reality seemed unclear. It was as if we thought of it so often, yet spoke of it so rarely, that it became like the memory of a vivid dream upon waking. When we spoke about building a raft from junk, we agreed that we had always intended to do so - as if a vital part of our boyish childhood instinct contained such a yearning, and yet, we listened to each other cautiously, occasionally trying to catch a quick glance into each others’ eyes to tell if we were being serious or not. We spoke of many things we wished to do, so many in fact, that the raft became just another part of the air we breathed: seemingly invisible until we flailed about excitedly and felt the wind against our skin.

For me, there was never a question about who I wanted to work with on this project. Nico is the sort of person that many of us may know of, but few are blessed enough to really know. Even in Junior High, at a time when kids are clawing their way through a seemingly endless and awkward gauntlet of equal parts self-expression and self-depreciation, Nico seemed constantly comfortable in his own skin. He exuded confidence to everyone within earshot of him, in a completely genuine and natural way, instantly putting his company at ease and always in good form. To this day, he remains one of the most solid and enjoyable persons in my life, and even the most hardened and withdrawn roommates I’ve endured over the years have come out of their shells long enough to inquire, “Who was that?” after one of his California visits.

Aside from being an excellent companion, Nico has the ability to really formulate ideas and listen when someone else is speaking. It isn’t obvious how little people listen to each other until you speak to someone who thoroughly understands how to do so. In this manner, many long and hilarious anecdotes have been shared, often ending in loose-knit plans for creating something tangible, and always ending under the influence of Canadian beer (which is, incidentally, the best kind of beer one can consume). For those of you who have had the poor misfortune of coming into this world south of the Rocky Mountains, I fear you may never know the joys you have missed all of your years without a swill of ice cold Kokanee beer straight from the bottle.

When Nico and I would see each other after months, sometimes years of distance with our respective “regular” lives, we would comfortably fall right back into the rhythm from where we left off, and it seemed like the topic of the raft was always at the front of our conversations. So it wasn’t until I called him up one day in spring, and actually set a concrete date for a two-week vacation late in summer to execute the idea, that we began to seriously consider one another as viable sources of inspiration. It wasn’t really even the raft so much, I think, as it was the instinct that had been awakened that we were excited to explore. So many times, with so many people, we have spoken so loudly and with mocked expression about all of the grandiose things we were going to do with our lives, and so rarely did any of those things materialize.

I am a young man. I have lived a large amount of life in a short amount of time, and have found many riches in my limited accomplishments - namely in my son. I am a young man, but I am old enough to understand that in the last ten years I have lost something. The days seem shorter in recent years. I have found a great difficulty in falling asleep at night and even greater difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. I feel like I used to have more energy. I used to be funny. Lighter, somehow. Indeed something is missing, and I dare not let another ten years pass without finding where I put that gestalt. When we began this project, we joked that so many people told us it wouldn’t work we ought to christen the raft, “The Naysayer”, but now sitting here writing these words, I think that the raft was named in honor of ourselves, and in honor of any man who is brave enough to realize that often times we are consumed by fear - so much so that our dreams lose precedence over other more practical matters - put off but not forgotten - stored in the back of our minds until one day we are too tired and too dark, and we find that our entire lives have been spent doing only the things we knew we could do in place of the things we never knew how.

This raft is dedicated to all of the Naysayers in the world. May we continue to doubt ourselves and each other until we can’t sit still another minute.