Along the Way

Along the Way HOW I FOUND TRUE HAPPINESS BUT BOUGHT THE BOAT ANYWAY

A wiser man would have recognized the bad karma from the beginning. But I was young and foolish. And I'd always wanted a boat: wind in my hair, spray in my face, as effortlessly cool as a beer commercial. So I ignored the warning signs. Besides, this was mad money. I'd just won $1,000 in a nationwide writing contest for a series of articles about heart disease.

I haunted the classified ads for several weeks, thinking that for $1,000 I could get a little sailboat, or maybe a bass boat with an aluminum hull and a putt-putt motor. I pictured myself bobbing about on Canyon or Apache lake, lord of the weekend.

But what I really wanted was a ski boat with a purring engine capable of churning the water white. I wanted something as good as Drake's boat. He had been my best friend since childhood, and his family had a ski boat and a lakeside cabin.

So I drifted past the ads for little bass boats with their 15-horsepower motors. Then I saw it: Ski boat. 80 hp Mercury. 15-foot Larson hull. $1,200. I drooled and rushed to the phone, ignoring the gathering karma.

The woman didn't seem to realize she was asking $1,500 less than anyone else advertising ski boats. The family didn't use it anymore, she said, not since her husband fell off a stool at work and suffered brain damage. It was just taking up half the garage, reminding her of happier times.

I murmured sympathetically. My eyes glittered. I talked her down to $1,000. It was Friday. She agreed to let me take the boat to the lake and try it out before she cashed my check.

I shall skip lightly over my wife's reaction to the ski boat in her driveway. Suffice it to say that she didn't have a childhood friend with a boat.

I shall also brush past the fine points of hooking a boat to a trailer hitch for the first time and learning to drive a vehicle with a boat attached.

Suffice it to say we launched ourselves onto the scenic splendor of sheer-walled Canyon Lake an hour's drive from Phoenix by Saturday afternoon.

The motor didn't work.

My wife stared at me grimly and restrained herself. My three children hid their smiles, but not very well.

On Monday morning, I visited a boat mechanic. On Tuesday morning, he told me I needed a $1,500 engine rebuild. Someone had been using the boat in the ocean, he explained. It was all corroded inside.

I called the woman with the injured husband and said I was bringing the boat back. She said she spent my $1,000 first thing Monday morning.

I called the boat guy and told him to rebuild the engine. I was, by then, hooked: a determined man with several major credit cards. Two months later, they finished the engine rebuild. They wanted $2,500. After some lively discussion, we settled on $2,000.

I took the rebuilt boat and my skeptical family back to the lake. The boat still didn't work.

In the next several weeks, the boat mechanic guys discovered a malfunctioning electrical doohickey and some kind of a broken thingamajig. Of course, each of these discoveries cost me $100 and another weekend humiliation.

But at last the boat worked. What a glorious day! The sun shone with a special sparkle. The water was perfect. My children bounced and hollered and laughed in an inner tube hurtling along behind the boat. My wife continually recalculated how far it would be should we have to swim back to shore.

The next week, we went with Drake and his family to Sedona and from there hauled the boat to Lake Mary. I was determined to show off my affluence and sheer grown-upness. So we left the women and the smaller children on shore, where, they later swore, they found bear tracks.

The boat roared out into the middle of the lake. And the engine died. We'd forgotten the paddles. So I breaststroked back to shore, the bow rope clenched between my teeth, cursing as well as I could without opening my mouth.

Ultimately, the chief boat mechanic guy confessed that he'd fired the guy who'd done my original engine rebuild. He offered to rerebuild my engine, free - if you don't count the accumulated humiliation, the derision of little children, and the cost of the marriage counseling.

"You know the two happiest days in a boat owner's life?" asked the mechanic, a man so laconic, picturesque, and folksy that I had to resist an urge to strangle him. "No, what are the two happiest days?" I muttered.

"The day he buys it ... and the day he sells it," he chortled. My wife would have liked that joke. I never told it to her.

The boat worked great after that. We had a wonderful time, except for when I lost my car keys in the lake, the weekend the boat ran out of gas, the day its battery died, the morning the trailer jumped off the hitch and rammed the car from behind, and the afternoon I bent the boat's propeller on a submerged rock.

Waterskiing was every bit as much fun as I remembered, especially speeding up rocky gorges in a lake as warm as bathwater. Now if I could just convince someone to go with me without all that business about double-indemnity life insurance.

But I love the boat. I savor the wind and the water and the smell of the engine. You haven't lived until you've skied a desert lake in your very own boat.

I would never sell her.

Except for that incident on the stool at work the other day. Now we don't go out much. I'm very flexible on price. Give me a call. I'm in the book.