Holyoke Water Power Company, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that there are those among the keeper’s followers who may recall the ill-fated expedition when the keeper and his son Mike rigged a pontoon boat for a trip down the Wisconsin/Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, and only got as far as the Highway 14 bridge before they were literally grounded when the river was turned off during the night at the Sauk-Prairie dam.
To say that the planning was incomplete would be a kind assessment, but there is a long history of river calamity with the keeper’s clan—including a sudden squall that blew away all the camping gear, ankles so sunburned the keeper could not walk, and many other crippling adventures.
The river jinx obviously continues, as an intended voyage on Mike’s pontoon boat, with the keeper and Phyllis and Sarah and Jessy, turned ugly when hidden rocks intervened and the outboard quit and there was no paddle on board, and Jessy used a broom to guide us downriver to a safe mooring.
Except for a lifetime of conditioning, Mike might have been embarrassed by the occasion of his future son-in-law paddling with a broom to rescue his passengers and what was left of the day. He wasn’t, of course, suggesting at one point, that Jessy broom-paddle a little harder to the right.
The occasion brought back memories of the gang of strong Chicago canoeists who rescued the keeper and Mike by pushing their stranded boat off a dry sandbar and back into the river channel. That could have been embarrassing too, but it wasn’t, proving apparently that some things just run in the family and there isn’t a lot to be done about them.
