W.carter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in celebrating the good-news story about the 1200-year-old dugout canoe being found and retrieved from Lake Mendota, to become the oldest retrieved watercraft in local history.
And, of course, news of the event triggered a Lake Mendota memory of many years ago when the keeper, in the risky company of United Press staffer George Armor and Shamrock saloon keeper Dan McCarthy, was on an alleged “outdoor writer” assignment out on Lake Mendota when the prop fell off their outboard and sank to the bottom of the lake.
As they were stranded miles from their dock, the resourceful and borderline outlaw trio “borrowed” a prop from a boat conveniently perched on someone’s dock hoist and used it to return to their put-in location. If memory serves—and it doesn’t always, they returned the borrowed prop and made a clean getaway.
But somewhere on the bottom of Lake Mendota is that lost prop, and while it’s retrieval obviously would have little historic value compared to the dugout canoe, it would be a powerful reminder to the keeper that in his day he kept some interesting company and did some adventurous things.
It was all part of his journalistic “work,” the keeper claims, and he couches his memories in the statute of limitations.
