William Wharton - Houseboat on the Seine

‘Honest, Dad. I can hardly understand what they’re saying and what I do understand, I don’t want to try translating. You don’t need to hear all this anyway. Just play dumb.’

‘Come on, Matt. I already am dumb, but I’ll need to deal with it sooner or later.’

‘OK, as far as I can tell, they’re both objecting to the fact that your new boat is going to take up more space than the old one. It seems the river law is that there’s supposed to be five meters between each boat. Teurnier insists that when your boat is in place, there will be at least five meters on each side. I think he’s right; they’re only being hysterical, fighting for and defending territory.’

‘So what else are they saying?’

‘Madame Le Clerc objects to having our old wreck of a boat beside her beautiful mansion of a boat. She’s going to call Le Navigation . She claims Monsieur LeCerb, the boss man there, is a friend of hers.’

‘That sounds bad. What do they want me to do, just sink my barge again?’

‘It all sounds bad, Dad. I can’t exactly translate what Luce, the other lady, the one on the pirate boat, is yelling because she keeps slipping into Breton. She’s the one who really seems to get M. Teurnier’s goat. She’s apparently bawling him out in full voice, exercising her waterfront knowledge and expertise in Breton obscenity. And all this hollering brings out the Breton in M. Teurnier. He yells back at her, sometimes in French, sometimes in Breton. The last thing he told her was if she didn’t shut up and go inside, he was going to come up on that boat and give her a spanking.’

‘This is better than a movie. Too bad we’re in it, even as extras. By the way, what happened to our audience?’

While all this is happening, the other frères Teurnier have been shoving our boat back into the space they’ve cut out. They concentrate and work, don’t say a thing. They’ve wedged our barge close to the bank, but it’s still too long and too deep in the water to fit properly. They use their boat as a tug to push it in sideways. They manage to work the front end, the downriver end, in, where the water’s deeper and there’s no sandbar, but the back sticks out about a meter and a half more than it should. Teurnier’s pulled out a tape measure and is measuring the distances between the boats. He shouts out the measurements to each woman; there is almost six meters on each side. They screech back at him now, words even I can tell would never be approved by I’Académie française.

As it begins to grow dark, we decide to leave the boat as is, with its upriver end, the cut-off stern, sticking out. I ask Matt to translate for me. I’m desperate. They’re about to leave, and I need to move the back of the barge against the berge . Matt listens carefully, then turns to me as they’re making ready to pull out. The crew has piled a stack of equipment on the back deck of our barge. Matt looks at me through the gathering dusk.

‘He says there’s a dredger upriver who can come here and dredge out the rest of the sandbar. It’ll probably cost another four hundred francs or so. He’ll check for us.

‘Also, he’s left cutting tools and an arc-welding set here. Tomorrow, someone, probably one of his brothers, will come at eight in the morning to start cutting out the windows. You should be here to tell him where you want them and give him a hand. He says they shouldn’t be cut closer than forty centimeters from the water level and there should be a minimum of three structural struts left in place along the sides between each window. At least that’s what I think he said.’

M. Teurnier and the rest of his finger-brothers are on their barge and about ready to head home. M. Teurnier stands at the stern lighting his pipe. He smiles at us between puffs. He seems happy with what he’s done. My God!

He yells one last time. Matt stands on his cast, pushing himself up with his crutches. He cups his hand to his ear, picking up what Teurnier’s saying over the noise of his boat’s motor. Matt turns to me as they disappear.

‘He says not to bother about what Mme. Le Clerc will say to the Navigation or M. LeCerb at the Ponts et Chaussées. Teurnier’s going to stop by and see him on the way through the lock. He’s convinced that will do it. You’re perfectly legal.’

So, there I am, with two half-assed boats joined in a naval wedlock, sort of a shotgun wedding at that. The sun is just about gone. I wander through the upper boat. It’s encouraging to see it drying, but it’s filthy. I wonder how I’m ever going to work my way down into the lower boat. All the hatches where the pumps have been cut off are now covered by the bottom of my wooden boat, so it’s completely sealed. Also, how am I going to nudge this brute into place? I’m tired. I’ll worry about it tomorrow. I feel like a water-logged French Scarlett O’Hara. I guess M. Teurnier is my Rhett Butler, and in his own way has just told me, ‘I don’t give a damn.’

The next day I come with a shovel, a pickax and a large bucket; it’s one of the buckets we used to scrape all the ‘gook’ out of the lower boat. I’ve borrowed a pair of hip-high boots from my friend and painting buddy, Jo Lancaster. I also have a winch, what the French call a tire-fort, along with two significant lengths of chain that were part of the mooring system for the old wooden boat.

I use the plank, M. Teurnier’s plank, to walk across to the boat. I walk along the narrow passage beside the upper boat to the bollard. I loop my short chain over it, then hook one end of my winch to both ends of rope. I throw the rest of the winch onto the bank. I know damned well everything I’m going to do would drive a real boatperson amok. This will be strictly a landlubber’s solution. But, after all, that’s what I am.

Next, I go straighten out my winch, wrap the longer of its two chains around the largest tree on the bank, bring it down and attach both ends to the hook on the other end of the winch. I begin cranking to take up any slack. I’ll be trying the impossible, digging a channel through the sand barge with my shovel into which I can pull my canted boat against the shore. This is all according to my general life-theory that if you don’t know how things should be done, everything is possible.

I wade into the water in Jo’s hip boots, carrying the shovel. I decide I probably won’t need the bucket. I’ll just throw the sand farther out into the river. I’m wishing I had Matt with me to crank the winch as I dig. I start digging. The boat looms above me. I dig under the rear end of the boat on the land side, where it’s grounded. Each time I think I’ve cleared it a smidgen, I give a few cranks on the winch. I can’t tell if it’s working or not. A few passersby are convinced I’ve completely lost my marbles. It goes slowly, but I can actually see the boat is inching its way closer to shore. I check to see if the cables I’ve strung holding the front of the barge are secure enough.

They’re fine. I’m back in the water. I’m working out the hang of it. Thank God, that sandbar is sand, so most of what I scoop into my shovel, I can actually throw out of the way, deeper into the river. If it were mud, as most of the bottom here is, it’d be hopeless.

Just then, the beat-up deux chevaux arrives. It’s one of les frères Teurnier , the one who dressed M. Jacques Teurnier in his diving suit. He stares at me a few minutes, trying to figure it out, then begins to laugh. It’s as if he’s crept up on someone building a pyramid with pebbles. I admit I’m beginning to have great sympathy for those Egyptian slaves working in the shadow of pyramids hanging over them, stacking gigantic blocks while they weren’t even sure if the whole uncanny-looking mess wasn’t going to topple over on them.