Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

 

Building A Boat.

The New Jersey village in which I was brought up had one thing lacking according to the unanimous opinion of the boys, and that was some kind of a stream or lake large enough to float a boat.

The nearest lake of any size was the Mill Pond at Bonhamtown, a matter of three miles or more away. Three miles is not much to the owner of a good horse or an automobile, or when it is near some trolley line, but in my boyhood days there were no automobiles and no trolley cars and our family did not sport a horse.

We had nothing to depend upon but "Shanks Mare," besides small boys cannot always get permission to go three miles away.

I learned to swim when I was a very little boy, maybe six or seven years old. We made a place large enough for kids of that age to swim in by damming the little brook which flowed by our house.

The dam was usually made of mud and sods and usually broke away about the time that the water began to run over the top.

When I was older we used, when we had the whole day to spare, walk three miles to Red Root Creek, a salt-water creek on the Raritan River.

Down there, there were fish and eels to be caught and sometimes crabs.

The only ponds in Metuchen were small duck ponds, usually without outlet or inlet. The water in these ponds was none of the cleanest but then kids don't bother about such things as clean water.

About half a mile from where the boys lived there was such a duck pond called Wright's Pond. It was about a hundred feet across and in the deepest part about four feet deep. The bottom was nothing but mud, rich, thick, sticky mud.

In this pond were the usual fish which are not very particular what kind of water they live in, cat-fish, eels, sun-fish and shiners.

We could always count at least on catching some sort of a cat-fish and with great luck might pull out an eel a foot long.

What we longed for was a boat. We sometimes made rafts of any old logs or boards that came handy, but rafts have a way of upsetting when there is more than one boy aboard. Rafts become water-logged when left in the water and sink in a horrible manner when many get on.

After much collecting the boards we finally got together the makings of a boat. About boat making I and the other boys knew nothing.

Being inlanders we had seen nothing of the boat building that goes on whenever there is water enough to float a boat.

We had read of Noah's Ark, but the working directions for making such a boat are not given very definitely in the Bible.

We finally did build a boat about ten feet long.

We had no working plan, just nailed the boat together according to the length and width of the two side boards which we had.

Being an absolute greenhorn at the business I made one fatal mistake.

When the side boards were in place we had a wide board placed toward the bow of the boat to hold the two boards out and give the thing the proper width and curve. Before the bottom boards were nailed in place, I, like a fool, took out this stretcher board and the finished boat was consequently the shape of a wedge, and very narrow at that, at the front end.

We painted the boat, and with much tugging and straining carried it the half-mile to Wright's Pond.

It floated beautifully.

Three of us got in and started to fish.

Frazer got a fish on his line and in his excitement moved to the narrow end of the boat. The boat filled and sank by the bows. The fish got away.

We dragged the boat toward shore, bailed her out and resumed our fishing. We made a fixed rule … Not more than one boy to get into the front end of the boat at one time.

A day or two afterward an older boy by the name of Ladd used our boat. He did not properly observe our rule about two boys in the front end of the boat. Ladd sank, got mad, and hove a lot of big rocks into the boat. The boat sank. I reckon that at this writing, fifty years after, the boat is there yet.

May Ladd's shadow soon fade.

We never placed another boat in that pond.

One day when it was too rainy outside to work, Dan, the hired man employed by Frazer's father, suggested that we make a net of some old horse blankets and "seine" Wright's Pond.

We sewed three horse blankets together, fitted proper sticks at each end and went off to the pond.

We dragged our seine across one end of the pond and as it neared shore I waded in and brought the lower edges of the blankets as closely together as possible.

There was a prodigious number of fish and eels in the net.

Unfortunately water does not run readily through a horse blanket.

We had no dip net with us with which to dip out the fish.

In attempting to let the water out, every last fish got away.

After the first haul the fish were too much frightened to stand for another draught so we had to give up the job.

Wright's Pond had become at one time such a rendezvous for a lot of noisy swimmers that Wright forbid us to swim there any more.

In spite of the prohibition the swimming kept right on.

One day we discovered a nest of the large black and white hornet fastened to the upper rail of a picket fence near the gate leading into the pond lot.

This hornet builds a paper nest which sometimes is as big as a ten-quart pail.

We stoned the nest for a long time and dove into the water when the hornets came after us.

Wright came down from his house to drive us away.

When he got as far as the gate he changed his mind and went back.

We enjoyed his beating and thrashing to get rid of the hornets much more than he did.

One spring sometime after my fiasco in the way of boat building I built a little scow; a scow by the way is flat bottomed and square at both ends; and put it into a little pond on the property of Mr. Daniels.

The boat floated all right. One could paddle clear across the fifty-foot pond. Unfortunately not being acquainted with that particular pond I was unaware of the fact that it dried up in the summer, so my boat lay high and dry later in the season.

In the summer of 1929 I was standing on a. little dock running out into the bay at Whitestone, Long Island.

Below me were two lads of about ten or twelve years of age, clothed only in one-piece bathing suits.

Their father was getting ready a boat for the purpose of taking the mother and two little girls out to dig soft clams somewhere nearby.

The two boys hitched their boat to the larger boat and were towed along. Their little boat was the dead ringer of the boat described on page 124 of this book.

The same length, the same width, the same wedge-shape, the same flat bottom.

I said to myself, "I didn't suppose that there had been a boy on earth before my time or since who was dumb enough to build a boat that way, but there was one before my eyes and that, moreover, built by boys who had lived all their lives alongside the water and had seen boats built and repaired repeatedly.

The boys got into the end-seat of their boat and all went well until they both took a notion at once to climb into the big boat from the bow of their boat.

The boat sank just as did the one in Wright's pond long ago.

It was some comfort, even after fifty years, to learn that there are boys just as dumb as I was at their age.

Those who teach school know that generation after generation of boys and girls go through the same performances and do the same fool stunts that their parents did, while we parents, like Dives in the torments of Hell, would fain warn them of their dangers but they will have none of our advice.

 

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