Float On 

My dad had three children and two babies, the latter being his Lund and Naden fishing boats. My brother, sister, and I knew where we ranked relative to favored status. Dad’s boats brought him untold pleasure. They were his peace and quiet, his adventure and escape. His offspring? We were like outboard motors: temperamental and in need of troubleshooting.

The red Lund and blue Naden have always been family. When I was growing up, never once did I pass through New York Mills, Minnesota, and not hear from the driver’s seat that it was the birthplace of the Lund. My college roommates still crack up recounting how my folks delivered me to campus on move-in day towing my belongings behind in the boat. What does it say about my upbringing that I didn’t know this wasn’t normal? Didn’t know to be mortified?

Unknown to this day is how my eminently practical, conspicuously frugal father came to “need” two fishing boats. He didn’t even live on a lake. Dementia claimed that story before I thought to ask him. What I do know is that, were we to sell the boats now, Minnesota’s legendary 10,000 waters would rise up in biblical, roiling protest into which Dad would cast an angry line from heaven. Not gonna happen.

Rehoming the boats within the family was the topmost concern when my parents downsized and moved from central Minnesota—and its Charlotte, Latimer, Sauk, Big and Little Birch, Cedar, Horseshoe, and Pillsbury lakes—to “the Cities.” When Dad needed assisted living, we chose a facility on Lake Minnetonka because the available unit had a lake view—his first! The nearby boat slips provided ready fixation, with Dad announcing on the regular his plan to “offer ’em $40 to dock the Naden over there.” (Annual slip rental on Lake Minnetonka costs thousands.)

The Lund landed in the care of my son, who keeps it on a 160-acre bass lake a stone’s skip from Lake Minnetonka. I thought its proximity would comfort my father, that boat talk would go the way of “Largemouth or smallmouth?” No. Dad’s losses were too many and too deep.

“The grandson who stole my van?” he’d ask me, referring to the Dodge Caravan that had hauled his boats. 

“Yes, that grandson, Dad. And you gave him the van,” I’d answer. 

I didn’t fare much better in my care and keeping of the Naden, which resides in my garage still. We got it and Dad out on the water a few times, his hand on the tiller and a backup handler on the next seat. The boat takes up half my garage and, I’m sorry to say, doubles as a storage container. (I have to stow the patio table umbrella and artificial Christmas tree somewhere!)

One day, I sprang Dad from his care facility and brought him to visit the Naden. As the garage door opened, he saw, filled with junk, what should have been a shrine. His voice got small, and he had to grip his walker to steady himself. I hadn’t thought to empty out the boat.

As Dad’s age and dementia advanced, so did his conviction that we’d stolen his boats—“we” being some amorphous band of evildoers posing as family. (Delusions are common in those with dementia.) No reassurances, photographic evidence, pilgrimages, or boat rides stuck with Dad long enough to soothe all that had gotten away from him: his boats, his fishing buddies, his ability, his freedom—everything but his desire.   

Being attached to our outdoor playthings—to all that stuff in the garage—isn’t, I’ve come to appreciate, so much about the gear itself but where it takes us and who it lets us be. And that is what stayed with my dad until the end.

My town has a summer festival whose parade took place the day of Dad’s memorial service. Unloading the Naden, we hosed it down and hitched its trailer to Dad’s old fishing van. His favorite tackle box, repurposed as an urn, rode securely in the Naden for the funeral cortege. The side streets down which we drove paralleled and intersected the parade route. I told Dad the blaring police cars and fire trucks were for him … and the Naden.