It should have been a simple repair. Two 26’ leaf springs (only one was broken, but you always replace both), one new 26’ hanger (that’s the piece that attaches the leaf spring to the frame), and some assorted nuts and bolts should have put us within hours of restored function.

But no. It turns out that there’s twenty-six inches, and then there’s twenty-six inches, depending where you measure from. Different trailer part manufacturers make it a point to measure from different spots so that, once you use their parts, you’re locked in to their scheme. Our 26’ springs fit neither the one functioning 26’ hanger still on our trailer nor the new 26’ hanger we bought to replace the mangled one.

I was this close to calling for a congressional investigation, but I figure, what with health care reform, the economic crisis, and the Afghanistan situation, our legislators have their hands full.

We solved the problem with brute force, by chopping up our hangers.

A hanger is a bar with a bracket on either end. The bracket holds the spring, and the bar spaces the brackets. We cut off the brackets, positioned them to fit our 26’ springs, and planned to weld them to the frame.

What you need to weld

If you’re going to weld, you need a welder (the piece of equipment) and a welder (the person trained to use the equipment). Neither Kevin nor I has the first or is the second.

Our friend Dan, though, has one and is the other, and today he brought both to our house.

Over the past year, I have learned to appreciate power tools, and have been come tolerably conversant with things that saw, drill, and nail. But welding takes power tools to a whole new level. The spark-generating level.

What you need to rule the dark side

Your fist clue that a welder (the equipment) is a breed apart is that the welder (the person) has to wear a Darth Vader helmet to use it. Your second clue is that, before you fire the thing up, you check that the water is turned on and your hose is working. And your worst suspicions are confirmed when the sparks start flying. All over.

I am assured by people who can weld that it’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do. Our friend Jeannie’s eyes light up when she talks about welding, and she jumps at the chance to permanently fuse one piece of metal to another. Let her loose with a welder and the next thing you know you can’t open the refrigerator.

Even so, I was content to watch Dan from a safe distance.

I'd like to tell you that was me welding ...

Once our hacked-off brackets were welded to our trailer frame, and the leaf springs seemed to be doing their job, we reclaimed the boat from the pond. There was a certain satisfaction in having defeated the Trailer Cabal and repaired, for about $250., what would have cost over $2000. to replace. It was particularly satisfying for me, since Kevin did all the work.

Kevin says next time he’s shelling out the two grand.

We are now, once again, afloat. We’re going to check our lobster pots in the morning.

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I didn’t, until ours broke.

A leaf spring is a piece of metal, in a flattened U-shape, that suspends the body of a trailer above the axle and cushions the ride by acting as a shock absorber. When it breaks, the trailer and its contents (in our case, a boat) drop down on the axle, rendering the trailer unusable.

A functioning leaf spring

Had we not moved here, I suspect I would have gone my entire life without ever learning about leaf springs, and that would have been okay.

I thought that we’d be simplifying things by moving to a shack in the woods, and growing and gathering our own food. Now I understand that, if you want a simple life, you buy a condo in Manhattan. Once you have that, all you need is a cell phone and a Metrocard.

The list of things you don’t need in Manhattan is much longer than I ever imagined. You don’t need a car or a boat or a trailer or another trailer (one for the boat, one for everything else). You don’t need a string trimmer or a rototiller or another rototiller (one works, one doesn’t). You don’t need a chop saw, a circular saw, a table saw, a reciprocating saw, or a chainsaw. You don’t need a compressor, and you don’t need nail guns. You don’t even need shovels, rakes, or a post-hole digger. And you sure as hell don’t need leaf springs.

The simple life, though, requires all this stuff. If you want to fish, you need a boat and a way to get it to the water, into the water, and out of the water. If you want to grow food, you need tools to move earth. If you want to keep chickens, you have to be able to build a coop and a run. If you want to burn your own wood, you need a way to chop it down and chop it up. If you simply want to own exterior space, you need to be able to cut grass, trim trees, and top-dress the driveway with crushed bluestone.

Unfortunately, the paraphernalia that enables you to do those things also gives you more things to do. Vehicles have to be registered, licensed, and maintained. Tools have to be oiled, sharpened, and charged. And that’s before anything breaks. And things do break. And you can’t call the super.

Our shack in the woods

Over the last year, we have fixed the exhaust system and the wiring on the truck, the cooling system on the car, the gas tank on the boat, and the hub on the boat trailer. And those were just the major items; I won’t bother you with the broken oarlock on the skiff or the slow leak in the compressor or the perpetually deflating tire on the utility trailer.

And now it’s the leaf springs.

For a while there, I was starting to feel overwhelmed. So I did what many of us do when we’re not at our best. I complained to my mother.

If it’s sympathy you’re after, don’t ever complain to my mother. She will give you constructive suggestions, she will quote a relevant poem, she will offer you some lunch, but there will be no poor-dearing or there-thereing.

My mother is on the evenest of keels and, because she takes everything in stride, it’s natural for her to think that everything ought to be taken in stride. The only things that really get her attention are death and serious illness, and serious illness is chancy. My sister-in-law Lisa calls her “the mother who fell to earth.”

When I told my mother about our never-ending to-do list and the last-straw nature of the broken leaf springs, she nodded her head in perfect understanding and told me about what Uncle Frank and Aunt Dag, on whose farm she spent her childhood summers, used to talk about at breakfast.

My great-great-aunt Dagmar Dahlquist came late to farming. She’d been brought up to work in her parents’ grocery stores, and that was what she did. In 1925 she was 43, and everyone assumed that she would live out her life a spinster, behind the counter in the grocery in Carlos, Minnesota.

Then one morning a recently widowed farmer named Frank Palmer came into the store. Dag had known him for years; he came in regularly and was a fixture in the community. On this particular morning, he had clearly dressed carefully, and seemed intent on a purpose.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Palmer?” Dag asked him.

“You can marry me, Miss Dahlquist.”

She did. And, at about the age I am now, she entered into a life that required a slate of skills she didn’t have. She didn’t know the first thing about chickens, or horses, or cows, or sheep, or pigs, all of which were resident on the Palmer farm. She’d never had so much as an herb garden, and had no idea how to grow things. She couldn’t even cook. (She could fix a truck, but Frank didn’t have one.)

She took this in stride and did what any red-blooded, self-respecting, middle-aged woman would do. She learned.

Okay, she didn’t have leaf springs, but she didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing either.

Every morning, at breakfast, Frank and Dag would talk about what needed to be done on the farm. A fence needed mending, the wheat needed sowing, a chicken needed killing, potato bugs needed to be picked off the potato plants. The honey had to be collected. The eggs had to be gathered and taken to the co-op.

Whatever it was, when breakfast was over they went out and did it, with care and good will. They prospered, and built a life that made both of them happy.   It’s that simple.

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They always look smaller in the water

That was supposed to be a joke, but we are now the owners of a nineteen-foot Eastern, a broad-beamed fiberglass fishing boat with a center console and a 70-horsepower Johnson outboard. We took it for its inaugural voyage today, launching at the north end of Cotuit Bay. We tootled around the calm water in the bay, with Kevin at the helm and me lolling in the bow, thinking how very spacious the boat was.

Then we went out through the cut between Cotuit and Sampson’s Island, out into Nantucket Sound. All of a sudden, the terrain shifted. The waves were feet instead of inches, and as the boat rode up them and plunged down them, I felt my heart beat faster. I knew that, as waves go, these were pretty tame. I knew that the boat was built to handle much, much more serious water than this. But it’s hard to talk yourself out of fear.

Over the sound of the engine and the slap of the boat against the water, I heard Kevin saying something to me. I couldn’t quite make it out, so I turned around to face him and put my hand to my ear. He repeated it, and this time I heard him quite distinctly.

“You still want a smaller boat?” He was grinning devilishly.

No. No, I don’t want a smaller boat, thank you very much.

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For us, “bigger” means bigger than the skiff we keep in the pond. Since the skiff is only twelve feet, our “bigger” covers a lot of territory. We’ve been looking in the fifteen-to-seventeen foot range, with me leaning toward fifteen and Kevin leaning toward nineteen.

The bays and inlets that are our primary stomping grounds

Fifteen feet is big enough to navigate our two small, enclosed bays, Cotuit Bay on the south side and Barnstable Harbor on the north. In appropriate weather conditions we could venture farther out, to Nantucket Sound on the south or Cape Cod Bay on the north. Fifteen feet is also small enough to be powered by a motor with horsepower in double digits and to be easily trailerable, considerations for, respectively, economy and mobility. Because we want a boat primarily for fishing and lobstering, and not for drug running or party giving, a boat that size seems to me to be about right.

But it’s a slippery slope, and just last week Kevin showed me a listing of a 26-foot boat that he liked the looks of. To me, that seemed like buying a motor home, but Kevin has owned boats before, and has first-hand experience with how much drier and more stable a bigger boat is when the weather is anything but glorious. He thought it was pushing our size limit, but he also saw the possibilities it would open up. It could handle ten lobster traps. It could go to Nantucket. It could weather big waves.

He was interested enough to show it to our friend Dan, who knows absolutely everything about boats. Dan thought it had problems unrelated to its size, but also wondered why someone looking for a fifteen-to-seventeen foot boat would expand the search to include a 26-foot boat. “That’s a lot of boat,” he told me. “If Kevin wants a feel for how much boat 26 feet is, tell him he can come over and paint the first 26 feet of ours.”

Moving day

When he says “ours,” he’s talking about a 1973 Grand Banks 42, a beautiful wooden ark-like vessel. To Dan and Linda, it’s 42 feet of humming machinery and polished trim that can take them virtually anywhere in the world. To me, it’s an object lesson.

Dan and Linda live down the street from us, and when we first moved to the Cape, the boat was in dry dock on their front lawn. It was an excellent landmark, and long before we met its owners, we used it when giving directions. “When you see the lawn with the ark on it, we’re just around the next bend on the left,” we’d tell people.

After we’d lived here a couple of months, I was out one morning getting the paper at the local convenience store, and I saw a guy about my age dressed in running gear. I was looking for places to run, so I asked him about it. We started talking, and he mentioned that he lived in the house with the boat. “Oh!” I said. “You’re Noah!”

It turns out I was wrong about that. Technically, it’s Linda who’s Noah, since she’s the captain. Dan is chief engineer, first mate, and all-around crew.

Forty-two feet of boat isn’t too much for Dan and Linda, who have mad maritime skills, but I got a first-hand experience of the perils of bigger boats when I helped them get theirs off the lawn and into the water. “Helped” overstates the case a bit. I did a little last-minute touch-up painting, and then drove with Linda behind the huge boat-moving truck with its hydraulic trailer watching Dan, who rode on the boat, moving tree branches out of the way as we made our way down the street to the marina.

The launch went smoothly but, throughout, I found myself thinking that fifteen feet was plenty of boat. A little under, even, would probably get the job done. Hell, maybe we could fold one out of newspaper. Meantime, though, I’m very glad to be friends with Dan and Linda. It’s been raining non-stop here for what seems like months, and I’m perfectly willing to help round up the animals two by two in return for a berth.

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