skip to main |
skip to sidebar
You’d be down the block with friends, pouring kerosene on the fireant hills. Suddenly the roar of dad’s powertools would cease to echo off the longleaf pines and all the neighbors would visibly relax. This meant it was dinnertime, so you’d best pocket those matches and get your butt home. Years later when dad asked me to help him lay the mahogany deck, we oftentimes wouldn't even bother to stop for dinner… it was that much fun. Thanks, Dad!
Whence the Swampscott?
Winters get pretty bleak, you know, in Massachusetts.
Oh but the cold sank so much deeper in the short days of 1838, when memories were black and white. When sounds fell silent with heavy frost. When ma'ams dreaded the hoary storms that cast their Ichabods to the barnacled graves of Nahant Bay.
Oh but the cold sank so much deeper in the short days of 1838, when memories were black and white. When sounds fell silent with heavy frost. When ma'ams dreaded the hoary storms that cast their Ichabods to the barnacled graves of Nahant Bay.
Pilgrim grim.
One bleak morning the womenfolk moped into breakfast at the local creepy church. A thin syrup of tears poured over not-so-hot cakes. Jesus winced over pewter mug slurps as the ladies told their woes… unnerved by skeletons of their lobstermen churning clicky-clack over surf pebbles, weary of tea-which no one really enjoys if they're being honest, and sick of lonely oil lamp midnights, sulking into icy featherbeds that were awfully lumpy, but never quite lumpy enough.
Just do unto it.
Hair buns held tight, then yielded just a little, then frizzed totally as the ladies headscratched for a solution:
Perhaps they could spare their wretched husbands by constructing a rugged surf dory. A fast sailer. Flat-bottomed to beach. Round-sided to haul in nets of crab. Highly stable to never swamp, not even in the leviathan swells.
Huh?
Well mayhaps they might visit upon the Indians and learn their timeless methods of survival?
No, friend. God had cast the Indians away and their gravemound housed a taffy shoppe.
How about they forego fishing the terrible ocean, and simply trap the plentiful mutton and venison of the forest?
Aye, friar. Except ladies prefer chowder to stew.
Well then let the women take to sea. Joining the men in peril, so any loss of life would be shared - an ultimate act of union?
Oh Christ, what was that first idea?
And thus, with love as her mother, ye Swampscott dory was conceived.
Perhaps they could spare their wretched husbands by constructing a rugged surf dory. A fast sailer. Flat-bottomed to beach. Round-sided to haul in nets of crab. Highly stable to never swamp, not even in the leviathan swells.
Huh?
Well mayhaps they might visit upon the Indians and learn their timeless methods of survival?
No, friend. God had cast the Indians away and their gravemound housed a taffy shoppe.
How about they forego fishing the terrible ocean, and simply trap the plentiful mutton and venison of the forest?
Aye, friar. Except ladies prefer chowder to stew.
Well then let the women take to sea. Joining the men in peril, so any loss of life would be shared - an ultimate act of union?
Oh Christ, what was that first idea?
And thus, with love as her mother, ye Swampscott dory was conceived.