The Boat Who Wouldn't Float Read Online Free Page A

assorted ironmongery.
    Passion Flower came adrift. At first, so closely were the cars packed, she did not have much room to manoeuvre. But after half an hour she had managed to clear a little space forherself. Each time the Carson dropped her heavy snout into a trough, my Flower took a run forward to bring up against the stern of a Pontiac owned by a U.S. Air Force captain stationed at Stephenville, Newfoundland. Each time the Carson lifted her bows and sagged heavily back on her fat buttocks, Passion Flower charged astern, and rammed her towing hook into the grill of a Cadillac belonging to one of the industrial entrepreneurs who were then beginning to make Newfoundland their happy hunting ground at the invitation of Premier Joey Smallwood.
    Having somewhat foreshortened these two cars, Passion Flower developed enough elbow-room to snap their moorings, and then the three of them began charging back and forth together. The chain reaction that followed turned the lower vehicle deck into a shambles that may not have been matched since Claudius Tiberius arranged for three hundred elephants to be stampeded in the Coliseum by forty Nubian lions.
    The unloading process at the point of arrival, Port aux Basques, was lively and interesting. The comments of drivers, as they descended to the dock to claim their mutilated vehicles and to arrange for tow trucks, were robust and hearty.
    Although she looked as if she had been on ice-breaking duty for several months, Passion Flower drove off the ferry under her own power. Apparently she had suffered no serious internal injuries. She was, as Wilbur pointed out with no little awe, “still good fer it!”
    The five-hundred-and-fifty mile voyage across the centre of Newfoundland was a prolonged exercise in masochism. In those days the Trans-Canada Highway was still a dream existing mainly in the minds of politicians in Ottawa and in St. John’s. The reality was so dreadful that nothing but a jeep or an army tank—or a dromedary—could have coped with it. Very few travellers had the temerity to try. Most of them chose to have their vehicles loaded on flat cars at Port aux Basques and shipped by rail to St. John’s. I might have done the same had not Wilbur assured me that he had driven the road “t’ousands of toimes,” and that there was nothing to it.
    He was right. There was nothing to it-nothing that could have been called a road. It took us five days to reach St. John’s and by then Passion Flower was on her last legs. She had blown seven tires; had lost her few remaining springs (her shock absorbers had been absent for years); her muffler; her tail pipe; and her confidence. She staggered into St. John’s an old and ailing vessel; but, by God, she got there on her own.
    Wilbur left me in St. John’s. I asked him where he wished to be put ashore and he directed me to a grey mass of buildings on the city’s outskirts. The place looked indescribably gloomy and forbidding.
    â€œAre you sure,” I asked, “this is the place you want?”
    â€œYiss, me son,” Wilbur replied happily. “Dat’s t’Mental. Dat’s t’very place where I belongs!”
    It was, too. They met Wilbur at the door and they were as glad to see him as he was to see them. One of them, an intern, I believe, told me about it.
    He said Wilbur had been an inmate of the St. John’s Mental Hospital for going on twenty years. He never made any trouble; but every now and again he would escape and take a “viyage.” In his mind’s eye he too was a sailor who sailed the seven seas; but after a few months away he would grow lonely and then he would come home.
    Wilbur shook my hand heartily and thanked me kindly.
    â€œAny toime ye needs a mate, ye just calls on me, Skipper!” were his parting words.
    And maybe I will; for I have been shipmates with many men I have liked a good deal less.

 
    3. The sea-green bride
    A LTHOUGH I